Billionaire Mitchell Rales has donated $1.9 billion to his Glenstone Foundation, which supports Potomac, the Glenstone Museum in Maryland. The 2021 donation is one of the largest ever made to an arts organization. To date, it has been used to fund the running costs of the private Museum of Contemporary Art, which Rales co-founded in 2006 with his wife, Emily Wei Rales, and on whose land the couple maintain their primary residence. The money was also used to cover costs associated with capital construction projects, facility maintenance and acquisitions. The museum inaugurated a new 4,000 square foot building last June to house the monumental work of Richard Serra Four towers: equal weight, unequal measure, 2017, a four-part steel sculpture weighing 328 tons. Additionally, the foundation distributed a portion of the funds in the form of major gifts to organizations such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Triple Aught Foundation, which oversees Michael Heizer’s massive project. City1970–, in Garden Valley, Nevada.
The donation, consisting of cash and stock from Rales’ industrial conglomerate, Danaher Corp., brings Glenstone’s net assets to around $4.6 billion, putting it on the same financial footing as the Metropolitan Museum of NYC art. Bloomberg noted that the donation “dwarfs” the $200 million donation that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC the same year. “An endowment like [Rales’s] means this museum can exist in perpetuity,” Evan Beard, executive vice president of arts investment platform Masterworks, told the publication.
In addition to the building unveiled last summer, Glenstone currently includes a 30,000 square foot exhibition building designed by Charles Gwathmey and a series of 204,000 square foot pavilions designed by Thomas Phifer, as well as a sculpture park occupying part of the 230 hectares on which it rests. The museum, which is a nonprofit and free to the public, welcomed 100,000 visitors last year; by contrast, the also staffed Met welcomed more than six million visitors a year before the pandemic.
