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.” 

Harris and Commanders owner Dan Snyder are hoping to execute a contract in the coming days, said the people, who were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the transaction publicly.

Harris declined to comment. A representative for the Commanders declined to comment.

The deal between Snyder and the group led by Harris, the Philadelphia 76ers co-owner, would end one of the more tumultuous and controversial ownership tenures in modern U.S. sports.

Harris’ group includes billionaire Mitchell Rales, an ARTnews Top 200 collector, and former NBA star Magic Johnson.

The negotiations, which took place over the last six months, occurred amid the constant specter of whether Jeff Bezos, the world’s third richest man, might submit a bid. Bezos is worth $124 billion, nearly double the NFL’s next richest owner, but never submitted an offer.

If the deal closes, it will be the highest price ever paid for a sports team, eclipsing the $4.6 billion that Rob Walton paid for the NFL’s Denver Broncos last year.

It will also end Snyder’s 24-year ownership tenure, which has soured as fans and fellow owners distanced themselves amid allegations of a hostile workplace culture and financial wrongdoing. Those controversies sparked speculation over whether the league might need to consider the unprecedented step of removing an owner, conversations that continued even after Snyder retained Bank of America to explore a possible sale.

The co-founder of Apollo Global Management, Harris, who grew up in the D.C. area, has been looking to grow his sports portfolio beyond Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns the NBA’s 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and the Prudential Center. Also an investor in English soccer club Crystal Palace, he was a runner-up in bidding for both the Broncos and the New York Mets in the past few years. Rales is the co-founder of Danaher Corp. (NYSE: DHR).

In addition, Harris is a minority partner in the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers, a stake he will have to sell should he take over the Commanders. That equity was previously held by David Tepper, who had to sell it when he bought the Carolina Panthers in 2018.

Snyder purchased the Commanders, then called the Washington Redskins, in 1999 for $800 million. At the time, it was the most valuable sports team in the world, but it has slipped over the years because of struggles on and off the field. Sportico currently values the team at $4.8 billion, which ranks eighth in the league.

The Commanders have made the playoffs just five times since the 1999 season, and won just one postseason game (2005). In the NFC, only the Detroit Lions have gone longer since their last playoff victory. The Commanders averaged 58,106 fans at home last season, the lowest total in the NFL.

That attendance slide—the team averaged 83,172 fans in 2010, second most in the league—shows the extent to which the Commanders’ fans turned on Snyder amid the team’s many controversies. They include long-running reports of rampant workplace harassment, a Congressional investigation into financial impropriety, and his staunch opposition to changing what many considered a racist team name (he finally relented in 2020).

The sale also comes on the eve of another investigation into Snyder’s stewardship of the team. The NFL last year hired former SEC chair Mary Jo White to look into the franchise, and that report is expected to be released in the coming weeks or months.

As the Snyder drama increased, so too did frustrations within the NFL and the other 31 franchises. In October, ESPN reported that Snyder claimed to have “dirt” on other owners that he could use if they turned against him. Shortly afterward, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay became the first to publicly say Snyder should be ousted, and the pressure has mounted since then. The process to remove him, however, is complex, and could have set a precedent by which other NFL owners could be forced out in the future.

One of the first priorities for the new ownership group will be a new stadium. FedEx Field, the team’s current home in Maryland, opened in 1997 and does not have the revenue-generating trappings of newer NFL venues. That will be an expensive endeavor, especially if public funds aren’t made available—Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s privately financed new stadium in Los Angeles cost more than $5 billion—but it will also improve the economics for the Commanders moving forward.

(This story has been updated to include information on Harris’ stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers.)

The museum, which was founded by collectors Emily and Mitchell Rales, acquired the work from a David Zwirner exhibition in New York centered around the works, collectively titled “Tree of Knowledge” (1913–15). The acquisition was announced by David Zwirner ahead of a London version of the show set to appear at its space in the British city in March. A representative for David Zwirner said the gallery could not comment on the price of the series.

In an email, Emily Rales, who appears with her husband on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, said “The addition of Hilma af Klint’s work to this group is especially exciting because it complicates the traditional narrative. Her innovation compels us to recognize that art history is neither monolithic nor linear. It’s a complex story that is always ripe for reinterpretation.”

Glenstone’s acquisition of the paintings is a landmark event, given that no other U.S. institution—not even the Guggenheim Museum, whose 2018–19 af Klint retrospective in New York drew vast crowds—owns works by the artist. If works by af Klint have been seen in the U.S., they have typically come there as loans. The Museum of Modern Art included an af Klint painting in its 2019 rehang, but that work had been loaned by a foundation dedicated to the artist.

Part of the reason for this gap in U.S. museums’ collections is strictures put in place by af Klint’s foundation. Af Klint, who died in 1944, said she did not want individual paintings to head to market—she instead preferred for them to be bought as series. Because of this, it has been extremely rare for af Klint works to hit the market. “The works acquired by Glenstone Museum are among the most significant works by af Klint ever to be sold,” curator Daniel Birnbaum, who is at work on an af Klint catalogue raisonné, said in a statement.

Af Klint has been an a figure of vast intrigue for many, given that she claimed that she could use her abstractions to communicate with otherworldly spirits. Her paintings have also held an unusual place in art history, given that she was the rare woman creating abstractions in Europe at a time when many of her colleagues were men, and indeed, the Guggenheim’s retrospective provocatively positioned her as the inventor of modernist abstraction. A 2013 retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm—which has a long-term agreement with the artist’s foundation, allowing it unusual access to her work—helped bring af Klint’s work to the attention of the larger public after decades of obscurity.

“Tree of Knowledge” stemmed from the spiritualist impulse that guided much of af Klint’s work after 1906, and features a central tree element that appears to evolve in form across the watercolors. At times, the tree is nearly unrecognizable as a plant, instead looking like an object resembling a cross between an orb and a machine. In these works, elements derived from Christianity, Hinduism, Norse mythology, and Rosicrucianism combine. Julia Voss, the art historian who has written most prolifically on af Klint, has said that the series represents a “development… As is often the case in af Klint’s works, there are two overlapping levels, one biographical and one that relates to the history of humanity.”

Until very recently, it was assumed that there was only one version of “Tree of Knowledge,” and that that one version was held by af Klint’s foundation. It turned out, however, that there were two, the second having been held at a foundation for the Theosophist poet Albert Steffen in Dornach, Switzerland. Historians realized that af Klint had given the watercolors as a gift to the theorist Rudolf Steiner, with whom she was close. Steffen obtained the “Tree of Knowledge” works in 1927, following the 1925 death of Steiner, who had led the Anthroposophical Society before Steffen.

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.”

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.

Why open a museum, anyway?

Désiré Feuerle.

“Growing up in Indonesia, I have always been aware of the limited opportunities to engage with and learn about the arts in this country. There are countless talented artists here in Indonesia who deserve a platform to share their work with the world.”
–Haryanto Adikoesoemo

“We can be more nimble than a traditional museum and create a dialogue between the four categories we collect.”
–J. Tomilson Hill

“We have commissioned so many artworks that are so large and so big and so important in the world. We’ll bring them to Budidesa for permanent display.”
–Budi Tek

“We need to collect foreign art so that our museums can be on par with foreign peers.”
–Wang Wei [as told to the Financial Times]

NEW MUSEUMS TO WATCH: Marciano Art Foundation (Maurice & Paul Marciano, Los Angeles, early 2017) • Pinault Collection (François Pinault, Paris, 2018) • Art Jameel Center (Jameel Family, Dubai, 2018) • JNBY Art Center (Li Lin, Guangzhou, Fall 2018) • GES2 (Leonid Mikhelson, Moscow, 2018)

FUN FACTS:

Before it was home to a museum, the new branch of Crystal Bridges was a cheese-making facility owned by Kraft Foods. Located a couple miles from the main Crystal Bridges building, it will retain it’s industrial look.

4,000: Number of water lilies, irises, and rushes on Glenstone’s verdant property in Potomac, Maryland.

After deciding that she didn’t want a bunker or a factory for her Berlin museum, Julia Stoschek settled on a World War II–era Czech cultural center. “The space in Berlin marks a very important and very interesting chapter of East German history,” she said.

Public and private are never completely separate, and this is especially the case with Museum Voorlinden, which hired Wim Pijbes as its director. Pijbes had been a general director for eight years at one of the world’s most important institutions—the Rijksmuseum.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 84 under the title “Private Practices.”