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.