The election results among staff at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) were unanimously in favor on June 6. Voting with UAW Local 2110 occurred a month after workers at the institution announced their intention to organize for a variety of issues including fair wages and better benefits.

AFAM was created in 1961 and changed its name from the Museum of Early American Folk Arts in 2001. The institution’s public galleries are located near the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in Manhattan, while its administrative offices, archives, and collections center are located in Long Island City, Queens. The museum’s collection of approximately 8,000 works of art from the United Stated and abroad, with the oldest examples from the turn of the eighteenth century. The union will include curatorial, retail, education, and information technology staff.

Other institutions located in New York City and across the Northeast that have unionized with UAW Local 2110 include the Dia Art Foundation, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

On June 6 and 7, hourly-wage employees at the Glenstone Museum held their own vote, joining Teamsters Local 639. A press statement said the group of 89 workers included all of the institution’s hourly guides, café workers, registration, grounds, engineering and maintenance, community engagement, and housekeeping staff. 

Glenstone staffers have called for livable wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions. A press statement on the vote said that many of the hourly workers had second jobs, part-time employees did not receive health care benefits, and that staff had been forced to work outdoors “during extreme heat and cold”.

A private museum, Glenstone was founded by billionaires Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales for the couple’s personal collection in 2006. The couple live across a pond from the institution’s galleries and have appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors List since 2010. A expansion of the museum, designed by architect Thomas Phifer, was completed in 2018 at an estimated cost of $219 million.

According to the Washington Post, staffers faced union-busting strategies from museum leadership, including an appeal signed by Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales delivered to the homes of workers on June 3. The letter stated, “It is our sincere hope that you give due consideration to voting NO and keeping the Teamsters out of this special place we’ve built together.”

“We have said from the beginning of this process that we respect the right of our associates to decide whether to join a union,” the museum said in a statement to The Washington Post, which first reported the news of the union election results. “We accept the results of this election and intend to negotiate in good faith with the goal of achieving an equitable contract for the members of this new bargaining unit.”

“These workers defeated a sophisticated union-busting assault personally waged by some of the wealthiest people in America,” Local 639 president Bill Davis said in a statement. “I want to welcome them to our local union, and I look forward to helping them negotiate a first Teamsters contract.” 

SPARC Names Director of Great Wall of Los Angeles Institute
The Social and Public Art Resource Center has named Pete Galindo as the new director of the nonprofit’s Great Wall of Los Angeles Institute, an eight-year initiative that will extend the Great Wall monument conceived by artist Judith F. Baca. Galindo has previously worked for SPARC as the public art director for the organization’s Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited Program. He was most recently the cofounder and CEO of Civic Center Studios, an events venue in L.A. In a statement, Galindo said, “The historical reckoning of the last few years have more fully revealed the relevance of Judy Baca’s vision, and I want to ensure that through The Great Wall Institute we’re training the next generation of artists and activists.”

[How Judith F. Baca plans to expand The Great Wall of Los Angeles.]

Mariane Ibrahim Hires Laura Turcan as Director of Paris Gallery
Laura Turcan has been named a director at Mariane Ibrahim gallery, which has spaces in Chicago and Paris. Formerly a director at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Turcan will be based in the French capital and will seek to widen Mariane Ibrahim’s reach in Europe. Avenue Matignon, where the gallery is located, “is changing, generating a new energy,” Turcan said in a statement. “I am eager to be a part of this renaissance.”

Ford, Mellon Foundations Commit $5 M. to Fund Disabled Artists Through 2025
The Ford Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have committed $5 million to the Disability Futures initiative through 2025. The initiative will provide support to two more classes of 20 fellows each. The program was conceived last fall as an 18-month program to support a disabled artists, with recipients receiving unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists. The next cohort of fellows will announced in 2022.

Mark Bradford.

Thursday, July 15

Mark Bradford Launches Education Program at Hauser & Wirth in Menorca
At Hauser & Wirth‘s new Menorca gallery, artist Mark Bradford has started an education residency program for students of the Escola d’Art de Menorca. His new initiative is part of a collaboration with PILAglobal, an education organization focused on displaced and impoverished families. Through the program, students will be enlisted to work with the artist to create paintings alluding to maps and immigration routes. “The project is a response to the global refugee crisis and our work together has been a meeting of minds across continents,” Bradford said in a statement.

Suzy Delvalle Named Interim Director of Socrates Sculpture Park
The Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, has appointed Suzy Delvalle to serve as interim director. She will take over for John Hatfield, who had led the museum for nine years and announced he would step down last October. A search for the institution’s permanent director is still ongoing. Delvalle was most recently the president and executive director of Creative Capital. In a statement, Ivana Mestrovic, the organization’s board secretary and treasurer said, “Suzy brings a wealth of experience working with artists and communities, and we have the utmost faith in her ability to lead Socrates as we continue our search for a permanent Executive Director.”

Art Basel Launches Podcast
Art Basel has launched a new podcast titled Intersections: The Art Basel Podcast. Sponsored by UBS, the series will be hosted by the fair’s global director Marc Spiegler, who will interview various industry leaders in art, architecture, music, fashion, design, literature, and culture. The first two episodes will be released on Monday, July 19, with interviews featuring acclaimed architect David Adjaye and music producer and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean. Future episodes will include interviews with artist Kim Gordon and her gallerist Lisa Spellman, as well as fellow Top 200 Collector Pamela Joyner.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber Adds Amy Feldman to Roster
Galerie Eva Presenhuber, which has two locations in Zurich and one in New York, now represents New York–based artist Amy Feldman. Feldman will have her first solo show with the gallery at its New York space in September and will also create a new work to debut in the gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland, which was rescheduled for September because of the pandemic. Feldman is best known for her large-scale gray abstractions.

Anton Kern Gallery Adds Yuli Yamagata to Roster
Anton Kern Gallery in New York now represents São Paulo–based artist Yuli Yamagata in collaboration with Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo and Galeria Madragoa in Lisbon. ⁠⁠Yamagata’s multidisciplinary practice makes use of painting, fabrics, and sculpture to explore ideas of image, taste, and identity. She recently had a solo show at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea Niterói in Rio de Janeiro. This September, the gallery will present Yamagata’s first New York solo exhibition. ⁠Coinciding with the exhibition, the artist will present a special project at Art Basel Parcours.

Wednesday, July 14

London’s National Gallery Picks Selldorf Architects to Oversee Renovation
Selldorf Architects, which has designed numerous art spaces over the past decade, has been chosen by the National Gallery in London to oversee the museum’s forthcoming renovation project. The New York–based architecture firm is a favorite in the art world, and has previously designed Hauser & Wirth’s and David Zwirner’s New York galleries, the Rubell Collection in Miami, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in California. It is currently at work on an expansion for the Frick Collection in New York. The initial phase of the National Gallery’s renovation will be completed in 2024, to tie in with the museum’s bicentenary. Gabriele Finaldi, the museum’s director, said that, of the six finalists for the renovation, Selldorf Architects “demonstrated a real understanding of our ambitions as well as sensitivity to the heritage of our existing buildings.”

CCA Santa Fe Names Danyelle Means Executive Director
The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe has appointed Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota) as its next executive director. She will be the first Indigenous person to lead the institution. Means was most recently the director of advancement of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and executive director of the IAIA Foundation. She has previously been a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Her curatorial credits include “Survivance and Sovereignty on Turtle Island” at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center in New York. Means was recently elected to the board of directors of ArtTable.

Getty Foundation Gives $1.55 M. for Prints and Drawings Initiatives
Nineteen institutions are set to receive $1.55 million from the Getty Foundation in support of initiatives focused on prints and drawings. Among them are the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, which is organizing a survey of Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club; the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, which is creating a digital experience focused on acid-based etchings; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which will stage a survey of Betye Saar’s travel sketchbooks. The full list of grantees is available here.

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein Names New Director
Letizia Ragaglia has been appointed director of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, succeeding Friedemann Malsch, the founding director of the institution. Following a stint as a freelance curator, Ragaglia served as director of the Museion, Bolzano’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, from 2009 to May 2020. During her tenure she mounted numerous exhibitions of artists including Danh Vo, Carl Andre, Monica Bonvicini, and Claire Fontaine. In a statement, Ragaglia said, “I am tremendously looking forward to being involved in day-to-day museum work, getting to know the whole team and having the privilege of experiencing the ‘Liechtenstein context’ at first hand.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies Launches Tech-Focused Arts Grants Program
The organization Bloomberg Philanthropies will award $30 million to arts organizations through its new technology-oriented Digital Accelerator Program. Among the art spaces set to receive funding through the initiative are BRIC in Brooklyn, the Queens Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the New Museum in New York. A full list of awardees is available here.

Tuesday, July 13

Tate Modern to Become Vaccination Site
A Sophie Taeuber-Arp retrospective going on view this week isn’t the only major attraction at London’s Tate Modern. The museum announced this week that it would soon become a vaccination site. It will offer Pfizer immunizations starting this Friday. Appointments can be made for free via an Eventbrite website set up by the museum

New York Foundation for the Arts Names 2021 Fellows
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced the 2021 recipients and finalists of its NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program. The program distributes unrestricted cash grants of $7,000 to artists working in 15 disciplines, honoring five disciplines per year on a triennial basis. This year, the organization awarded a total of $616,000 to 92 artists throughout New York State. The full list of awardees can be found here [link].

Mexico’s SFER IK Names New Director
SFER IK, a museum in the Yucatán Peninsula, just outside Tulum, Mexico, has named Marcello Dantas as its new director. Dantas is a Brazilian-born curator who has worked extensively throughout Latin America, holding senior positions at the Museum of Portuguese Language in São Paulo, Japan House São Paulo, the Museo del Caribe Barranquilla, Colombia, and the Telecommunications Museum in Buenos Aires, among other institutions. He has also frequently collaborated with Ai Weiwei, organizing an exhibition of the artist’s work in Brazil in 2018 and another in Portugal in 2021. SFER IK is an interdisciplinary arts center that looks to incorporate the institution’s surrounding natural jungle environment into its programming and installations. The institution launched shortly before the pandemic lockdown, and will reopen in November. In a statement, Dantas said, “My vision is to invite artists who will feel inspired to create work in this very special context.”

Monday, July 12

Glenstone Museum Announces New Building for Richard Serra Sculpture
The Glenstone Museum in Montgomery County, Maryland, has announced plans to construct a building along its Woodland Trail to house a recent large-scale sculpture by Richard Serra. The 4,000-square-foot concrete structure, designed as a collaboration between the artist and Thomas Phifer of Thomas Phifer and Partners, is slated to open in spring/summer of 2022. Two of Serra’s sculptures are already on permanently on view at Glenstone: Sylvester (2001) located near the museum’s entrance and a site-specific work, Contour 290 (2004), located near the Woodland Trail.

A rendering of the new building at Glenstone Museum designed in collaboration between Thomas Phifer and Richard Serra.

Société Now Represents Marianna Simnett
Marianna Simnett, an artist known for her videos focused on bodies in flux, has joined Berlin’s Société gallery. Simnett’s work has offered up fictional narratives that consider notions of purity and violation, as well as indefinable sexualities and identities. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, the Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London.

Romania’s Art Encounters Biennial Reveals 2021 Artist List
The Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, Romania, has revealed the artist list for its 2021 edition, which is due to run from October 1 to November 7. Curated by Extra City Kunsthal artistic director Mihnea Mircan and incoming Kanal–Centre Pompidou artistic director Kasia Redzisz, the biennial, titled “Our Other Us,” will be split in two and focus on shifting identities during the pandemic. Redzisz’s half will be a historical show focused on Eastern and Central European art, and feature works by artists such as Irena Haiduk, Jura Shust, and the Sigma Group. Mircan’s portion will feature works by Hito Steyerl, Laure Prouvost, and Jean-Luc Moulène. A full artist list is available here.

Lee Krasner’s The Eye Is the First Circle, 1960, sold for $11.7 million.

COURTESY SOTHEBY’S

In the days after any auction week, speculation on exactly who bought some of the marquee works is always high. Indeed, in a profile in yesterday’s New York Times, the paper of record speculated as to the client for whom dealer Robert Mnuchin purchased the $91.1 million Rabbit by Jeff Koons. While the most likely one is Steven A. Cohen, one name that circulated was Mitchell Rales.

Earlier today, Wall Street Journal reporter Kelly Crow wrote on Instagram about a conversation she had with Rales backstage at the WSJ Future of Everything Conference, during which Rales, who has been on the ARTnews “Top 200 Collectors” list since 2002, told her that while he was not the buyer of the Koons work, he and his wife, Emily, had purchased a different record-setting work at last week’s auctions: Lee Krasner’s The Eye Is the First Circle (1960) for their Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, to the tune of $11.7 million.

Reached by phone, a representative for the Raleses and Glenstone confirmed the purchase to ARTnews.

When The Eye Is the First Circle sold last week at Sotheby’s in New York, it shattered Krasner’s previous auction record of $5.5 million, which was set in 2017 at Christie’s New York. The piece is one of several large-scale works (it measures more than 20 feet across) that the artist completed in the years after the death of husband and fellow Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, as well as the death of her mother. On May 30, the Barbican in London will open a hotly anticipated retrospective of Krasner’s work.

The water court at the Glenstone Museum Pavilions.

IWAN BAAN/COURTESY GLENSTONE MUSEUM

Cloistered on a sylvan estate that was once used by a fox-hunting club in the wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb of Potomac, Maryland, the Glenstone Museum was for many years something of a mystery.

When it first opened to the public in 2006, visits to its 30,000-square-foot Charles Gwathmey–designed exhibition building and art-filled grounds were available only by appointment, a few days a week. Its founders—Mitchell Rales, an industrialist with an estimated net worth of around $4 billion, and his wife, Emily Rales, a former art dealer—rarely spoke to the press, and they were reticent about their long-term plans. By 2013, when they announced their intention to create a second, much larger building for the museum, fewer than 10,000 people had ever visited.

“It takes time to build an institution,” Emily told me recently, recalling those early years. “The intent was always there to be welcoming and to open our doors—it just took us a little while to get there.” Demand to see their formidable collection of predominantly postwar and contemporary art, which now numbers 1,300 works, ended up being enormous, she said. “It all boils down to very simple practical matters concerning infrastructure, parking, and staff. We had very little of those three things.”

That has changed. On October 4, the expansion—a 204,000-square-foot structure designed by New York–based architect Thomas Phifer, plus an ambitious landscaping initiative by PWP Landscape Architecture on Glenstone’s 230 acres—will be inaugurated. But on a hot June afternoon, as art was still being carefully installed, I toured the grounds and the building, which are astonishing in both their scale and their attention to detail. Once open, the enlarged Glenstone will rank as one of the singularly most ambitious and impressive private art museums in the world today.

An aerial view of the Glenstone Pavilions with Richard Serra’s Contour 290, 2004, and Tony Smith’s Smug, 1973/2005.

IWAN BAAN/COURTESY GLENSTONE MUSEUM

Phifer’s building is one of sumptuous simplicity, made of wood, glass, and some 26,000 blocks of concrete that went toward creating 11 galleries—Pavilions, in Glenstone’s parlance—many of which are devoted to long-term displays of pieces by single artists, including Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Charles Ray, and others. A lone space in the initial presentation will be devoted to 65 pieces by 52 artists from the museum’s collection, which is rich with the kind of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism that few museums can afford these days. (The museum has declined to state the cost of the expansion.)

“Glenstone is about this very contemplative and serene and minimal environment,” Emily said. “The architecture doesn’t try to outshine the art—it’s in harmony with it.” The Raleses were intent on finding a mid-career architect, and were taken with the North Carolina Museum of Art that Phifer completed in Raleigh in 2010, “seeing how sensitive he was to the landscape and the art,” she said. The building he designed for Glenstone has a potent but unusually warm sense of quietude that recalls Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba museum in Cologne, while its natural light brings to mind Robert Irwin’s subtle renovation of Dia:Beacon in Upstate New York. “We don’t want any light bulbs to be turned on during the day,” Phifer said, “so that you feel the movement of the light and the atmosphere of the light and the changing of the light from season to season.”

“More than anything else, we were looking for a slow, immersive experience, so that you begin to slow down and move through the landscape and move through the buildings with all these moments of reflection and pause,” Phifer said. He connected the eleven galleries with hallways situated around a sprawling water garden dotted with water lilies—a scene straight out of Monet. “We wanted to make a room that was about the sky, the light, and the water,” said Phifer, mentioning Ryōan-ji, the Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, as an inspiration for that tranquil open-air space. A long wooden bench by artist Martin Puryear, whose work the Raleses have collected in-depth, sits outside in the water garden.

In conceiving Glenstone’s expansion, Emily said, the team asked themselves, “How do we avoid museum fatigue?” and “How do we extend the museum experience so that it can cover maybe three hours, maybe five hours?” It’s easy to imagine a visit consuming half a day or more. The 50,000 square feet of exhibition space in the expansion is equal to that of the Whitney Museum in New York, and the grounds include a towering topiary piece by Jeff Koons, a Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller sound work harbored in dense woods, and large-scale sculptures by Richard Serra and Ellsworth Kelly. (The original Gwathmey building has 9,000 square feet of exhibition space.) There are two cafés and an arrival area with a bookshop, both situated away from the main building, so that the art experience is unimpeded by food and commerce, à la the Menil Collection in Houston. (Like the Menil, admission is free.) The museum is open four days a week.

Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker, 2000, is the first outdoor sculpture visitors see at Glenstone Museum.

IWAN BAAN/COURTESY GLENSTONE MUSEUM

Even as the expansion progresses, the Glenstone collection continues to grow and change. “Mitch and I make all the decisions ourselves” regarding acquisitions, Emily said. They prefer that to delegating those choices to advisers because “it’s just too much fun and we just love it too much,” she continued. “That said, we have very strict guidelines that we adhere to.” Among them is an intense focus on quality: “We’re very methodical about going after the best of the best,” she said. Any artist they buy must also have been active for 15 years, and they keep a close eye on what the nearby National Gallery of Art, whose board Mitchell is on, and the Hirshhorn Museum own. “We do feel very much connected to this community of Washington institutions, and we don’t want to duplicate their holdings,” she said.

They have shown a rare penchant for being patient in their pursuit. Among their prized artworks are key pieces by Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, and Jasper Johns, as well as what is perhaps David Hammons’s most famous one: How Ya Like Me Now? (1988), a roughly 13-by-19-foot portrait of a white-skinned version of Jesse Jackson accompanied by the text of that question. It was first shown in a public art exhibition in Washington, D.C., the year it was made, when it was vandalized with sledgehammers. (Hammons subsequently placed a fence constructed from those tools in front of the work.) “He’d held onto it for 20 years,” Emily said. “We were very persistent and we were willing to wait and we just kept asking whether or not he would be OK letting go of it, and he finally agreed, which was very exciting.”

One of their most recent purchases is Allan Kaprow’s Yard (1961)—a sprawl of rubber tires that can be reconfigured each time it’s installed. It joins a collection that has been adding photography, large-scale installations (another reason for the expansion), time-based work—including 144 pieces from the Canadian collector Ydessa Hendeles—as well as work from beyond the United States and Europe, like Japanese Gutai and Brazilian Neo-Concrete. “It’s by no means a finished project,” Emily said. “We still have a lot of work to do, looking at other traditions. It’s just going to take some time to build.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 94 under the title “Maximum Minimalism.”

Glenstone’s original home, a Charles Gwathmey–designed building in Potomac, Maryland.

ANDREW RUSSETH/ARTNEWS

With its hotly anticipated 200,000-square-foot expansion opening to the public early next month, and a preview for press just weeks away, the Glenstone Foundation in Potomac, Maryland, has been hit with a lawsuit by HITT Contracting, which worked on the building project. HITT alleges that Glenstone owes $24 million that was not paid for a number of changes made during construction.

News of the suit against Glenstone, which was created by Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales to house their formidable collection of postwar and contemporary art, was first reported by the Washington Business Journal and then picked up by the New York Times. The suit was filed late last month and alleges that Glenstone “demanded a torrent of changes in the work”—more than 2,400 in all—“and repeatedly disrupted or delayed HITT’s work,” and then failed to pay for the ensuing costs.

“HITT and its subcontractors were effectively forced to self-fund the project for the benefit of defendant for months at a time,” it reads at one point, and elsewhere it claims that from “approximately March 2014 to April 2016, the owner directed an average of two changes per working day, but refused to acknowledge the time and extended cost impacts associated with many of those changes.” (The emphasis is in the original.)

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the museum sent the following statement: “We will not comment on pending litigation, except to say that we look forward to responding to these claims vigorously in court, where we are confident they will be found to be without merit.” A rep for HITT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Glenstone opened in 2006 with a Charles Gwathmey-designed building and manicured grounds dotted with sculptures. The soon-to-debut expansion, designed by New York-based architect Thomas Phifer, was announced in 2013.

A rendering of Glenstone Museum’s expansion.

COURTESY THOMAS PHIFER AND PARTNERS

Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, will open its new 204,000-square-foot expansion on October 4. Visits to the expansion—a new building titled the Pavilions—can be scheduled starting in early September; admission will be free.

The Pavilions will provide an additional 50,000 square feet of exhibition space and will show works from the collection of Emily and Mitchell Rales. Included in the inaugural display will be works by Louise Bourgeois, Michael Heizer, On Kawara, Lygia Pape, and Martin Puryear, among others. The expansion, which cost more than $125 million to build and was designed by the firm Thomas Phifer and Partners and PWP Landscape Architecture, also adds 9,000 square feet of exhibition space to the museum’s existing building, as well as 130 acres of outdoor areas, two new cafés, a bookstore, and a new entrance.

Mitchell Rales said in a statement, “Throughout this transformation, we’ve maintained a single mission: to create a seamless integration of art, architecture, and landscape and make it available free of charge to all who wish to visit. We’re thrilled to begin welcoming visitors to this fully realized experience starting in October.”

Glenstone was opened in 2006 as a showcase for art owned by the Raleses, who have made the ARTnews “Top 200 Collectors” list each year since 2010. Located in a suburb of Washington, D.C., the museum has seen about 10,000 visitors a year, but at a press event this past November, Emily said that, with the expansion, the museum now hopes to welcome about 100,000 people annually. “I imagine that in the future, people will come to Glenstone when they want to experience what it was like in the 20th and 21st centuries,” she said at that time.