The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 15: Emily Rales
What if we supported artists in taking moonshots? This week we’re taking a tour around Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland— one of the largest and most ambitious private institutions in America, fusing art, architecture, and nature. This wide-ranging conversation between Glenstone’s co-founder and director, Emily Rales, and host Charlotte Burns, covers the art inside the museum and how to create more meaningful visitor experiences to the Glenstone foundation and future philanthropic plans. “Our values are immutable,” Emily says. “Art is essential to life. And sometimes when I say that to people, they're like, what does that even mean? But I really believe that art is essential to our civilization and to humanity.” She adds: “Long-term defines the way we think. We're not intending to go out guns a-blazing and then sun-setting the foundation within 20 years. We want this to continue to be sustained in perpetuity—and we really mean that.”
Emily Wei Rales. Photo by Julie Skarratt.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!
[Audio of guests]
I’m joining us today from Maryland, close to D.C. We’re visiting Glenstone Museum, one of the most ambitious private institutions in America. We’re talking to Emily Rales, its co-founder, chief curator, and director, as she takes us on a tour of the museum, its grounds and tells us all about the vision she has for the institution.
[Sound of the crunch of gravel and birds chirping]
Emily Rales:
So we just passed through the arrival hall, and then once you come through, we arrive at the bridge. And this is kind of a threshold between the commotion of the outside world and entering this kind of sacred precinct of art, architecture, and nature. It’s about a five-to-seven-minute walk. We intentionally made it this length so that people could really take the time to calm their senses and notice all the different sounds, textures, and occasionally get a peek of an artwork off in the distance.
So off to our left is Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker (2000). We plant that creature every May with 29,000 individual flowers.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Wow.
[Sound of birds chirping and the crunch of gravel]
So now we’re approaching the pavilions.
Emily Rales:
We’re approaching the pavilions. They were inspired by a number of different architectural precedents like San Gimignano hill towns.
This is an unfolding experience. You’ll get different views as you make your way through the landscape and then finally get up close. And that’s one way we keep you in the moment.
Charlotte Burns:
Right. Very present.
[Laughter]
Emily Rales:
So, welcome to the pavilions. At Glenstone, this is the primary space where we show art, and was conceived to be an unhurried and very calming experience.
So, shall we go down the steps?
Charlotte Burns:
Let’s go.
[Sound of visitors in the pavilions]
Emily Rales:
And here’s also the first hint that this is not a series of individual buildings but one that’s interconnected.
Charlotte Burns:
Emily, thank you so much for having me. Normally I say thank you so much for joining me, but you're hosting me here at Glenstone today.
Emily Rales:
It's been a pleasure. I've loved walking through with you and showing you Glenstone through new eyes. I always say I love bringing new people here because I can appreciate what we've built from the very beginning.
Charlotte Burns:
Walking around with you, so many people have stopped you and said, you know, “Thank you for this space.” People seem to feel a real connection with it. How does that feel to you to have the public interact with it in such a personal way?
Emily Rales:
I am so happy when people come up to me, it just makes it all worthwhile. We work very hard to create this experience, and it's been many, many years of thinking, of trying things out of experimentation, and that just makes it all worth it when someone gets a really meaningful experience when they come here.
As far as ownership, I don't really feel like I own this place. I'm just a steward. I dreamed it into existence with Mitch [Rales], and my hope is that it continues and sustains itself because people care enough about what we've built and people care enough about the artists that they will keep it going.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you have a favorite room? Are you allowed favorites?
Emily Rales:
No.
[Laughter]
The one coming up is probably in my top three. I’ll give you that.
This is like one of my favorites. I can’t say that there’s one. This is our Cy Twombly sculpture room.
[Audio of visitors in the room]
Charlotte Burns:
This is beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Twombly sculptures together.
Emily Rales:
Yeah. No, they’re very infrequently on view.
Charlotte Burns:
So this is in the top three, okay.
Emily Rales:
Mm-hmm
Charlotte Burns:
Have we seen the other two?
Emily Rales:
Well, one of them is probably our Richard Serra pavilion.
Charlotte Burns:
I can imagine.
Visitor:
Can I just stop to say…
Emily Rales:
Yes.
Visitor:
You did a fantastic job. Thank you.
Emily Rales:
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
Is this your first time visiting?
Visitor:
No, no. And I want to come back when the lilies are blooming.
Emily Rales:
Yes! Very soon.
Visitor:
Yeah.
Emily Rales:
Probably next month.
Visitor:
Yeah, right.
Emily Rales:
Well, thank you.
Visitor:
But thank you. Glenstone was fantastic.
Emily Rales:
Aw, thank you so much for saying that. Enjoy the rest of it.
Charlotte Burns:
Why did you want to create your own institution? Why create an institution at all or if you were going to create an institution, why not work with an existing institution? What about you thought “I have a vision”?
Emily Rales:
So it would've been a lot easier, of course, just to partner with an institution. We have wonderful institutions in Washington. I have affiliations with many other museums in New York, and I have to be honest that that was never on the table.
Mitch and I had a very distinct vision to create an experience, not just a collection, but an experience that's rooted in actual placemaking and this idea that nature and art and architecture come together to create a whole new sensory experience.
The other thing is that we really love Maryland, and Mitch is born and raised in this area. There's a lot of museums in urban areas, and we thought, well, why not bring high-class museum experience and world-class artworks to people in suburban Maryland? Why not? This is as good a place as Bentonville, Arkansas—to make a reference to Crystal Bridges—and we really admire what Alice Walton has done over there too.
Charlotte Burns:
You just mentioned Crystal Bridges. Were there other museums you looked towards? Which are the museums that were formative to you growing up, but also in thinking about this?
Emily Rales:
I didn't really visit that many museums growing up. This is something I came to a little bit later in life. I took an art history course by accident my first year in university and fell madly in love with the subject. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, so about as far away from The Met[ropolitan Museum of Art] as you can imagine.
So museums that we looked at very closely, there are a few. So Louisiana Museum, right outside of Copenhagen in Denmark, was one that we modeled ourselves after—the movement between interior and exterior, the outdoor sculpture, it's just sublime. And also the feeling you get at the Louisiana, you see people of all ages there. It's really a part of the fabric of their lives.
When we first visited Copenhagen to make this pilgrimage to Louisiana, we checked in at our hotel, and the very nice man behind the counter said, “Oh, what brings you to Copenhagen?” We said, “Oh, we're going to visit the Louisiana Museum.” “Oh! The Louisiana! I've been going there since I was a little child. There's this wonderful hill that me and my mates would roll down.” We thought, “Oh, that's so lovely that he has this fond memory.” Not of a particular [Alberto] Giacometti that struck him, but the sense of community and fun. So we thought, imagine if we could build something that people felt they could do and be themselves and feel like they belong there.
We also studied very closely The Menil [Collection]. Again, it's a campus with multiple buildings. And then the third museum that was formative for us was the [Fondation] Beyeler in Switzerland in Basel.
Charlotte Burns:
Aesthetically I can see this. Yeah.
Emily Rales:
Yes, exactly.
Charlotte Burns:
You said you weren't really one of those kids who was going to museums, wasn't thinking about art. It sounds like you had this formative experience as a student. How quickly did that accelerate? Because I know that before Glenstone, you interned at the [Solomon R.] Guggenheim, you worked at Barbara Gladstone [Gallery], you worked at J.J. Lally & Co. gallery in New York, so you quickly geared your life towards art.
Emily Rales:
I did, I did. So my entry into art was very intellectual. I remember a professor telling me, you know, it is art history, but it's more history than it is art. And I love the way that art was a reflection of the social and political, and economic conditions of the time, and I became really kind of enamored with that way of looking at history. But it wasn't until I had hands-on experience with making an exhibition that it really became my first love.
When I worked at the Guggenheim Museum, I took some time off my senior year against my parents' wishes, and I skipped a semester so that I could finish up this exhibition on Chinese art. It was this massive show, 5,000 years of Chinese art, which is a show you could not do in 2023, by the way. It just wouldn't be possible because to try to collapse all that time into an exhibition is way too ambitious. But it was the first time that many of these artifacts had been seen outside of mainland China so it was a landmark show.
I just loved being around the objects, learning about them, being in a space that was always thinking about the public. It felt like it was suddenly meaningful, you know, all this kind of studying I was doing. It’s only meaningful when someone is in front of this extraordinary bronze ritual vessel from, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and marveling at the technique. This sense of awe when you're in the presence of something really special was something that I knew I had to make a part of my life.
Charlotte Burns:
You also specialized in Chinese antiquities at J.J.Lally, but this collection is mostly Western artists. When did you make that shift?
Emily Rales:
So I made the 180 degrees shift because I have Chinese heritage, and a lot of these objects and artifacts are tomb goods, tomb artifacts. Something in me just felt fundamentally uncomfortable with the notion that these things were coming up from burial grounds and finding their way to the market and being sold to American and European collections. I'll just leave it at that. It felt like I was turning my back on part of my history, and I wasn't being responsible with these objects.
So I decided that I really wanted to work with artists. It's something that I always wanted to do, but never had the experience to do. And so I decided to look for a job in the contemporary art world, completely different. So I started out working at basically the front desk at Gladstone Gallery as a registrar after having managed a gallery in Midtown. I took a pay cut to do that and learned everything about how to run a gallery, how to get things shipped from one place to another, what crating is required for certain kinds of paintings, how to negotiate shipping rates, all of it. So I really cut my teeth at Barbara's.
Charlotte Burns:
I love that because I feel like when people think about contemporary art galleries, they have no real sense of what it is to actually work inside one, which is a pretty crazy experience usually because they’re small businesses with enormous international reach.
I do remember what you mean because I was front desk too once.
[Laughter]
Emily Rales:
We've all been in the trenches.
Charlotte Burns:
So how did you go from Gladstone to here? How did you get the confidence in yourself to be like, I am going to start working with artists, I’m going to follow my vision?
Emily Rales:
Luckily, Barbara had enough confidence in my skills to let me start writing press releases. I had the opportunity to work with artists within her stable, and that was really eye-opening.
One of the things that I will never forget was working with Thomas Hirschhorn on this really ambitious exhibition where he essentially transformed the entire gallery into this cave. You didn't recognize the gallery at all. And I remember thinking, this is the kind of transformative experience that you get from art that needs to happen more. And I said to Barbara, “This is, this is so life-changing for me. I wanna do this when it comes time for me to strike out on my own.” And she said, “Well, it's not easy” for a lot of reasons, you know.
That idea of Thomas Hirshhorn's madness and his vision has never quite left me. And because Mitch had a lot of confidence in my curatorial instincts, he gave me the platform to do some of these things that we just saw, for example, Bob Gober’s room four.
[Audio of visitors in the room]
Emily Rales:
The reason why our guide is here is that people will walk right past and not know!
[Laughs]
That there’s something inside there.
Charlotte Burns:
Right.
Emily Rales:
It’s kind of a secret passage. But this door…
Charlotte Burns:
It’s so airport chic.
Emily Rales:
Exactly, but this is a very utilitarian door and when we found it, he said, “It’s not banged up enough,” so he had construction workers use it and slam it and age it for about eight months.
[Laughs]
So that is like, that’s Bob Gober in a nutshell. But let’s go in.
Charlotte Burns:
Let’s go in. Thank you.
[Sound of door closing]
Emily Rales:
It's a room within a room with a hand-painted mural with running water coming through the museum, which any person who runs any museum would tell you you never want running water in a gallery space where there objects, very fragile objects on view that could be damaged but we did it anyway.
[Sound of running water]
That's been kind of my modus operandi, is listen to the artist, do everything you can to see it to completion, and your audience will get a much more meaningful experience.
Charlotte Burns:
What if you could commission any artist now? You must have wishlists.
Emily Rales:
Well, we have some irons in the fire already, so I'll share with you just one of them because it is slightly a little bit more further along than others, but we are working with Arthur Jafa on something very special, and I can't say any more about it because it's very early stages. But he is thinking through a permanent installation of his work here at Glenstone.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh, wow.
Emily Rales:
I think he's a brilliant artist. I think he's one of the most interesting artists that's emerged in the last, call it 10 years for sure.
Charlotte Burns:
I agree. And I was looking at his work actually in LA the other week. And it really disturbed me in a way that I haven't been able to shake. I think his work does that.
Emily Rales:
It goes to those places where many artists or many people wouldn't dare go to. Having been kind of on the margins of the art world for so long because he was a cinematographer, he could, you know, see what was happening, but he wasn't quite in it. So in a way, he has a sort of freedom to experiment.
Charlotte Burns:
It's sort of like the art world needs him more than he needs the art world.
[Laughter]
Emily Rales:
I think that's right.
Charlotte Burns:
Which is probably true of most artists.
Emily Rales:
Yes. Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
So I've never been to Glenstone before. I've seen it on other people's photographs, I've written about it probably. I've had an idea of what it would be to be in this space. But the thing that strikes me in moving through it with you this morning is that it's much more horizontal than I imagined. Partly because it's human scale because you walk around it, partly because of the horizontal nature of the architecture and the concrete blocks. They're not vertiginous. Also you have these huge panoramas, these big horizontal vistas sweeping out from, for example, the Martin Puryear room where you look across at the hills.
But then walking around it, it sort of moved beyond being filmic and I realized it was a little bit more like the theater. Like you're walking into a story that has just taken place or is it about to take place.
[Audio of visitors in the room]
Charlotte Burns:
Thank you so much.
Oh, wow.
Emily Rales:
Alright, ready for this?
Charlotte Burns:
Not really.
Emily Rales:
Do you have vertigo?
Charlotte Burns:
I’m never really ready for Michael Heizer
Emily Rales:
There’s real-life safety…
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah.
Emily Rales:
…concerns.
Charlotte Burns:
I can only ever nervously side-step to the edge of Heizers.
Emily Rales:
Yeah.
[Laughter]
You’re very brave.
[Laughter]
You’re very brave.
Normally people stay about yea far away.
Charlotte Burns:
Ugh, it’s so great.
[Birds chirping and crunch of gravel]
Charlotte Burns:
You've given so much to the artist's visions. And they're not connected, and there's not a forced connection between them either. And I'm not sure that I felt like I'm at the theater in a museum before in that way. Does that make sense?
Emily Rales:
It does make sense. I've not thought about it in those terms either, but it certainly makes sense. And it's because we make the artist's vision the most important priority and so each room has it's individual character. The connections are all but missing. They're not there.
Typically what curators do is they draw connections but I intentionally pulled that back because it's my view that the artist's vision and story and narrative should supersede the curatorial conceit that brings it all together. Our job here at Glenstone is to let the artists speak and then get out of the way. So you'll see that there's no didactics on the wall either. We don't dictate what a visitor may think or however they wanna interpret a work of art. Instead, we have guides. And those are the young people and the very friendly staffers who are stationed at every single room.
And I really think that interpersonal exchange with strangers doesn't happen very often in museums but there’s something very special about it. We encourage it. You're coming here as our guest. And we wanna have a conversation with you. We're not gonna tell you what to think, we're not gonna force you to love it. Feel free to hate it, but let's talk about it.
Charlotte Burns:
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about audience because this is something that comes up over and over again around Glenstone is it's free admission. Spaces are reserved. And that's because you have a purposeful intention to give people space. And you wrote an article during Covid talking about that space that museums had been forced into with social distancing, saying that for you, you could say that there was some benefits to that sort of social distance. And you wrote that “the expansion of the pavilions in 2018 increased our total indoor exhibition space from 9,000 to 59,000 square feet on par with that of The Broad in downtown Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of Art of and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
“But while he Broad and the Whitney each saw around 1 million visitors in 2019, we hosted one 10th of that number in our first year of operation. The fact that Glenstone is situated in a quiet exurb of Washington D.C. only partially explains the magnitude of the disparity. The real reason is that the experience we have developed for visitors is slow, quiet, and contemplative by nature.”
And you commissioned a lot of studies about the space that people needed to comfortably look at a work of art. What did you find out?
Emily Rales:
Well, most museums aren't gonna commission studies like this because they're not concerned about density.
How we came up with these numbers was quite easy. You just looked at the annual attendance of a place like the Guggenheim. You calculate the number of square feet available for the public to occupy. And then you just figure it out.
And we used a very kind of unscientific method of just going there, seeing how it felt, and then coming back here, and feeling what it felt like in the space when you allocated 300 square feet per visitor.
And that felt good. That felt like you weren't being rushed around. It felt like you could take your time and sit with something for as long as you wanted. And we're still playing with it.
Charlotte Burns:
It reminds me of something I read in The New York Times. You and Mitch were interviewed and they wrote, listening to you talk about “the creation of Glenstone is a bit like hearing two Harvard MBAs discuss how they built a Fortune 500 company.”
And Mitch said, “We've been very deliberate. We wrote a strategic plan, we did a lot of research. You can bring a business sensibility to the equation.” In what other ways have you brought that business sensibility to the equation?
Emily Rales:
We're very data-driven. So not simply square footage, a number of people, a number of staff people who work here, but it's down to tracing how our collecting patterns have evolved over the years.
So, in the beginning, there was no mechanism for seeing how many male artists versus how many female artists were in the collection. Now, every couple of months, we can look at a snapshot of exactly that. So, how many artists identify as female? How many identify as male? How many non-binary artists? How many artists of color? And we look at how those shift over time. You can look at it in totality. So we have about 30% women artists in the collection.
We take a very analytical approach to looking at the collection, how it breaks down demographically. We have visitor metrics, we have collection metrics, we track staff turnover. And so we are very driven by those numbers and we aim to exceed our previous achievements year over year.
What I mean by that in terms of the collection is, of course, we want a more diverse group of artists in the collection, but that doesn't happen overnight. And so it's incremental change, but we wanna see that incremental change sustain itself.
Charlotte Burns:
Mm-hmm.
Emily Rales:
And that's been a huge priority for us. Then the collection is also different from the program. So the percentage of women artists on view, for example, is more than 50% currently. If you remember, we walked past Kara Walker, Cecily Brown, Simone Leigh, and then in the other building, Rebecca Quaytman. This is all very, very carefully orchestrated because it's important to us that we have enough women on view at any given point in time.
Charlotte Burns:
Where do you look for or are you just inventing your own set of best practices around that? And how much do you share with other museum professionals?
Emily Rales:
We are just inventing our own goals. Our goal is to have at least 35% work on view at any given point in time by women artists and at least a quarter of the works on view by artists of color. We've exceeded those numbers. And what that tells me is that we can raise the bar, you know, going forward.
I love the idea of sharing our numbers with colleagues in the field.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, it's also because you can shape it more easily because you're directly funding the acquisitions, whereas with museums, what we've noticed is that a lot of the acquisition budgets are dwarfed by the gift. And so they can't outspend what the donors are giving them.
[Audio of visitors]
Emily Rales:
So this is our Brice Marden commission painting. We said, “If you were to make your Rothko Chapel, what would you make?” That was the idea behind this. This is a five-year product here.
Charlotte Burns:
Wow.
Emily Rales:
And it’s called the Moss Sutra with the Seasons (2010–2015). So spring, summer, autumn, and winter with the central panel that has all these mossy colors. And if you walk up to it and you see the panels in raking light, you can see the gestures underneath.
Charlotte Burns:
Underneath. Yeah. It’s like lace.
Emily Rales:
Mm-hmm.
Charlotte Burns:
We were just on attendance and I wanna talk a little bit more about that because it's become the main metric of success in the field. Museums have been actively striving and proving their worth through the number of visitors they get through the door.
Glenstone was criticized, in around 2015 during the Senate Finance Committee, when 11 private museums were asked about admission fees, opening hours, lending policies,, and visitor numbers. And the chairman's committee, the Republican senator Orin Hatch was determined to find out whether, “any of them provide limited benefits to the public whilst enabling donors to reap substantial tax advantages.”
Glenstone doesn't charge admission. It lends its work to other institutions, and it has around a hundred thousand visitors a year, but the focus of the committee on the volume of visitors seems really interesting to me in terms of the public perception of the role of a museum. Because on the one hand, access for all is a great ambition. On the other hand, people can become more conservative because they're trying to get the bums through the seats and you see less risk-taking.
But what do you think of that? Is attendance the metric of success? I know you're data-driven. How do you view your own success?
Emily Rales:
Clearly, we don't think it's the key metric for success. We never ever wanted to be attendance driven. It's this notion of quality over quantity. If you can have a more meaningful engagement for an individual visitor with the art on view, then isn't that better than having 50 people come through and not be terribly engaged or not remember what they saw or what encounters they had? I think attendance is an easy thing to latch onto because it's bodies, it's throughput but we are not a stadium. We're not, you know, trying to sell out all the seats. It's a very, very intimate experience to be in front of an artwork. I mean, those can be transformative experiences, things that you remember forever. So I think looking at simply attendance is too one-dimensional.
There's this book that we often cite, which is Jim Collins, Good To Great. And it's a business book and talks about how certain businesses become good, and others are able to rise above and become great. This author did all these case studies of different businesses and drew out certain qualities that he felt were essential to building great companies. He then wrote a supplement for the social sectors. The argument that Jim Collins makes in this book is you can use other metrics. So for the symphony, it's how many standing ovations you get. It's how many testimonials you get from people who just feel so compelled to share how great their experience is that they will write two pages in their visitor exit survey—which we get on a regular basis by the way.
We have a broad enough audience to serve that there can be different flavors of museums, and we're just a very slow and contemplative and quiet and intimate flavor of a museum that some people really find valuable.
[Audio of visitors]
Emily Rales:
So this is room seven. Again notice the slight incline. Every room has a slightly different entrance. And this is the other bench that Martin Puryear designed.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh, that’s beautiful.
Emily Rales:
The entire room is really about the bench and the view.
And this is our reading library. A place to take a pause, cleanse the palate.
Charlotte Burns:
Mm-hmm.
Emily Rales:
Because art can be alot to take in and so I hope you’ll sit down. It’s really beautiful.
Charlotte Burns:
Ah, it’s so beautiful.
Charlotte Burns:
You donated the sculpture [Hahn/Cock (2013)] by Katharina Fritsch of the bright blue rooster to the National Gallery of Art. You have given the Artist and Residence program at the Studio Museum an endowment gift of around 10 million, which provides a base of funding in perpetuity. You've also make lots of loans from your collection. How important is it for you to be in that constellation?
Emily Rales:
More and more important, to be honest. Glenstone Museum, the place and the program, we've built now, and it has its own reputation and we have our goals and it feels like we're well on our way to becoming a true full-fledged institution.
So over the next couple of years, I'm really turning my attention to the philanthropy side of the foundation. We also just recently helped to build an endowment for the Triple Aught Foundation, which is the foundation that owns and operates Michael Heizer’s City (1970-present) in Nevada.
Charlotte Burns:
Which is a great example of a work with different attendance metrics.
[Laughter]
Emily Rales:
Absolutely, absolutely. All of those things are examples of what you can expect to come in the future from Glenstone because a large part of my attention, certainly and Mitch’s also will be to establish our philanthropic parameters going forward and long after we're gone as well. This is going to be a major part of Glenstone, the foundation, the museum being only one of those things.
Charlotte Burns:
How are you thinking about approaching that philanthropy? I know you're very research-driven.
Emily Rales:
Well, I love this particular stage in brainstorming and in dreaming because there's so many ways to look at this. You could talk to academic institutions and ask, you know, is there truly a crisis in the humanities where students are increasingly turning their backs on things like English and art and women's studies or whatnot in favor of the STEM fields. That is happening across all universities in the US.
And so why is that? Because young people feel that they need hard science and engineering backgrounds in order to thrive in today's economy and tomorrow's economy. And I think that is a big, huge problem and how do we turn the tide? How do we reinforce the fact that the humanities and culture and then drilling it down even more, art is essential to creating complete individuals that value different things?
And the thing that I think is the most important about art is that it gives you license to dream. Artists are showing us all the time that they can think of spectacular visions, and that that is permission for a teenager to also dream big. Art is so out there, it's so otherworldly, and so we need these connectors, these community-building type of activities in order to progress as a society and remain humane.
We've gone through just a horrible time where basically all nuance is being eliminated in our public discourse. People are becoming more entrenched in their opinions. There's more polarization across the political spectrum. If people on the left and the right can't talk to one another out there in the world, I say, well, at least have conversations within the halls of the museum. I am often encouraging just our staff to have uncomfortable conversations because you can't do it in a school, if you can't do it in a museum, then there's no hope for any of us.
Charlotte Burns:
I guess that is a big ‘what if’, like what if you could help bring about change? I guess that's what you are grappling with. You are in a position to help bring about change and you are brainstorming where best to focus that.
Emily Rales:
Right. And I think using art as a vehicle for greater civility in our public conversation is something that I'm thinking about. Also listening to artists who have made social justice a primary part of their practice is another thing I wanna explore. Artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier, for whom her art practice and the work she does in communities is one and the same.
I'm thinking through putting together an advisory board of people just like that who have given themselves permission to think much more broadly about the art world because the art world is very small. You know, in the end, we, you know, the listeners of this podcast, we all know each other. And what I would love to see is our great work be appreciated by a much bigger population, a much bigger demographic, people from different, sociopolitical, socioeconomic realities.
I will cleave to this idea until I die that I think you don't need a Ph.D. to appreciate art. I don't even think you need much of an education to appreciate art. Yet, if you look at our visitor surveys, most of them have had higher education. Most of them are in their fifties and sixties. So we have a lot of work to do as museums, as art practitioners, to expand our audience. And I'm not even saying like what every other museum says, which is “Let's make sure our audiences are younger.” Like we're always going after the 20-something. Every single museum is opening up happy hour or Friday night free admission because they wanna go after this demographic.
I wanna say, “Well, what about the grandmother's like my mom's age. She lives in this community where most people speak English as a second language. Why don't those people come? Also, because they don't feel like they're welcome. This is not their place. So there's a lot of inroads I think we must make in order to make art relevant in the future. It's simply not relevant to the functioning of the broader society right now. That's our fault.
[Audio of visitors]
Emily Rales:
This is the one where I ask people, “What’s odd about this sculpture?”
Charlotte Burns:
Oh, it’s lower than it’s…
Emily Rales:
It’s lower on the inside.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, than the ground.
Emily Rales:
Mm-hmm. Just by two inches.
Charlotte Burns:
It’s funny, isn’t it? That two inches can be vertiginous.
Emily Rales:
Yes.
I know you spoke with Rashida Bumbray recently.
Charlotte Burns:
Yes.
Visitor:
Hello.
Emily Rales:
Hello.
Visitor:
How are you?
Charlotte Burns:
Hello.
Visitor:
Hi there.
Emily Rales:
Simone Leigh in all her glory. Here.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh, it’s beautiful.
Emily Rales:
Yeah. Very confrontational.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah.
Emily Rales:
And the missing face really confuses people sometimes.
Charlotte Burns:
You also mentioned different socioeconomic backgrounds and an interesting thing about both you and Mitch that you wrote in your giving pledge that you've made is that both of you come from modest middle-class backgrounds. Your grandparents left China for Taiwan during the Civil War in 1949. Your parents attended graduate school in the US and settled in Canada. Mitch's parents were the children of immigrants. His father grew up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York during the Great Depression. He was a self-made businessman.
How much does that shape your thinking?
Emily Rales:
It is always front of mind thinking about who we are able to recruit as staff here at the museum and keenly aware of the fact that the applicant pool is going to be a certain kind of socioeconomic background because, you know, you don't get into art to make money. And one of the things that I spearheaded here very early on was something we call the Emerging Professionals Program. And what it is, is a two-year stint at Glenstone geared towards kids who are right out of college or grad school. And it's a full-time job with benefits.
And if you came of age in the New York art world, in the early aughts like I did, that was unheard of. Absolutely unheard of. If you wanted a job in the art world, you basically had to do it for free, or you had to live on a barely livable salary. There are ways to crack this. We start with what we can control, which is who we can attract as workers here. And it's been great. It's been great to work with these young people.
Charlotte Burns:
You've taken part in the Giving Pledge. Can you explain that for people who don’t know what it is?
Emily Rales:
The Giving Pledge is a group of people who have declared publicly that they will be giving the bulk of their wealth away during their lifetimes. They want to devote a lot of time to thinking about their philanthropic goals while they're still alive and well. So we joined the Giving Pledge. It was founded by Bill Gates, and one of the first signers or pledgers was Warren Buffett. So many other people had followed suit, and because it was what we were doing anyway, it just simply made sense to sign up.
Charlotte Burns:
And when you signed that pledge, you said you'd given more than $2 billion to support your two main philanthropic causes, which is the arts and education. I'm imagining that's more now because you recently gave $1.9 billion to the Glenstone Foundation in order to secure its legacy in perpetuity. Can you talk a little bit about why you did that and what your plans are for the foundation, and sort of thinking about what perpetuity means?
Emily Rales:
It means perpetuity. That's really what it means. And $1.9 billion isn't enough for perpetuity. So this is just the first tranche, I suppose, that we are sending to the foundation, and more will follow with time. And It just felt like the right time. And by the way, there's a lot of very complicated financial calculations that go into when monies are transferred over. It just felt like the right time now and maybe it's also the gesture that tells the world that we're not going back. That is our line in the sand we have staked and it is a true commitment.
Charlotte Burns:
There is a kind of disconnect between the numbers and the way that art’s talked about and the experience of art. The numbers facilitate the vision, and yet I imagine that if you are the person facilitating the vision, that can feel frustrating sometimes.
Emily Rales:
I do want people to focus on the experience and focus on the artists and focus on the work. The numbers tend to be attention-grabbing, and I find that I spend a lot of time talking about the numbers, but that's not what I want to talk about because it really doesn’t matter. It takes away from what we're trying to build here.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, in a way though, if you're saying it's one point, you know, these figures for the for the foundation, I'm not sure how much people understand the difference between the museum and the foundation. And the work that the foundation is doing but I guess that's partly because you're still working through what that is.
Emily Rales:
Right. When you think about the process of designing a building, there is conceptual design, there's engineering, there's working drawings, and then finally, you're able to dig a hole in the ground and get to work. We are definitely in the conceptual design phase of what the foundation will become and what the philanthropy will be focused on.
So you're right. It's all very much happening in real-time, and it's like drawing on a whiteboard. I can't give you more than just very vague ideas of what we're thinking about right now.
Charlotte Burns:
The show is a ‘what if,’ and you are really in that phase of like, well, what if we did this, and what if we did that? How do you decide which of those ‘what ifs’ is the one you're gonna go with or one of the several that you will go with?
Emily Rales:
So before the research comes the values and our values are immutable. So our values include art is essential to life. And sometimes when I say that to people, they're like, “What does that even mean? No food and water and shelter.” But I really believe that art is essential to our civilization and to humanity. And so putting that front and center and just saying it can be very radical to certain people.
The other thing is long-term defines the way we think. So we're not intending to go out guns a-blazing and then sunsetting the foundation within 20 years. We want this to continue to be sustained in perpetuity, and we really mean that. But what we have to put in place in order for that to happen is we have to have very clear guidelines for our vision. We have to also be careful not to be too specific so that our successors aren't able to take calculated risks with how they interpret what we wanted. So it's a delicate balance of estate planning, basically, and creating the correct governance structure that allows for future visionaries to steward the foundation as they see fit.
Charlotte Burns:
What's so interesting, too, is that you are thinking so far ahead of your own lifespan, which most people struggle with. This idea of our own mortality is, you know, the biggest problem we all face. Have you always thought that way?
Emily Rales:
Always thought that way. Always. Mitch has always thought that way for his business and so he brought that long-term view to the thinking about the museum and the foundation. And I just relate to it immediately because I truly feel that we are only custodians for these artworks. The artworks are gonna outlive us. We just have to make sure nothing happens to it in the meantime while we're around, right?
We always have to make sure that we remember that we are small in the span of time. We have to have the humility to know that we are just a phase in the lifespan of an artwork or a building or whatever, and we have to create the conditions that ensure the longevity of these things because they're so precious to who we are as a people. It seems odd to be able to think beyond one's lifespan, but it has become second nature because I do it all the time. [Laughs] And also as a parent, right? It forces you to have that thinking all the time.
[Audio of visitors]
Emily Rales:
This is the only place in the building where you can come out and be really in the pond on this platform here. So this is a very prominent selfie spot for visitors with the water in the background.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
It’s so beautiful.
Emily Rales:
This bench was designed by Martin Puryear, and if you know his sculpture, you start to see kind of familiar lines and curves.
[Audio of visitors]
Emily Rales:
There are frogs in here. Yeah.
Young Visitor:
I think I just saw a tadpole I think.
Emily Rales:
Yeah, there are frogs. In the summertime, they stick themselves to the window, and they’re just like [gestures].
Young Visitor:
Oh, that’s great!
Emily Rales:
It’s really great. Yeah.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
You told The [New York] Times in 2013 that you had 800 works in your collection. It would double in your lifetimes. In 2018, you told The [New York] Times you had about 1,300 pieces. That was five years ago. I'm imagining you've grown. Where are you now? Do you have a figure? I'm sure you have a figure.
Emily Rales:
We're nearly 2,000 works of art. Some of those works of art comprise multiple objects. So it really all depends on how you're describing these things. Let's just suffice it to say that we've outgrown our art storage facility. [Laughs]
We don't seem to be slowing down at all because there's just so many great artists that are working today and we've kind of filled in the historical period and are really working with artists who are in mid-career at this moment. So it's new work coming out of the studio that we're looking at and acquiring for the collection.
Charlotte Burns:
You said once that you don't buy an artist unless they've been working for 15 years.
Emily Rales:
Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
Is that still the case?
Emily Rales:
Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
That's just a solid rule?
Emily Rales:
It's a solid rule with some notable exceptions.
[Laughter]
Rules are meant to be broken.
Charlotte Burns:
Right, exactly. That's that flexibility you were talking about. You need to leave something for your successors to be able to use as a precedent.
You are about to open in celebrating the fifth anniversary of Glenstone's expansion in 2018. You're gonna present a major exhibition from your permanent collection. Work by more than 50 artists. It's not gonna have an end date. I also thought that was really interesting way of thinking about the show. Tell us about that.
Emily Rales:
So the reason why there's no end date to that presentation is because we know from our visitors that they are pining for these works. Like they saw them at our opening in 2018. They saw the Jackson Pollocks, they saw the [Willem] de Kooning painting. They saw Giacometti, they saw [Mark] Rothko, and all of these sort of mid-century American masterworks people ask us about them all the time. “When are you gonna put those back on view? When are you gonna,” so we're gonna give them what they want and do this permanent collection hang that will, of course, evolve over time depending on when things are requested for loan. And also when we wanna shake up the cannon. I think this is a really fruitful arena to be doing things like that. For example, in 2018 when we opened this building, we hung a Jasper Johns painting, flag painting next to Faith Ringgold's flag, and it was a juxtaposition that no one had ever done before.
And what you noticed from those kinds of encounters is that not only is the least well-known artist presenting well in the company of these bold-faced names. Sometimes they surpass them, so that's really exciting. I'm really looking forward to opportunities to do that again.
Charlotte Burns:
Are you also acquired the Lee Krasner that broke the record at auction?
Emily Rales:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
The Eye is the First Circle from 1960, which set a record doubling the previous record for $11.7 million, which obviously, in ordinary terms, it’s a lot of money, but in the art market it’s not, and so these records are still so low. Do you see that with your budgets of acquisitions, that a lot of these female artists, for instance, their work is still undervalued.
Emily Rales:
It's a fact of the market. Does it change the way we pursue them? Not really. Do I think about the market when I think about what to focus on for the collection? No. Emphatically no. I really don't care what the market is supporting at the moment. The market may love something. It actually gives us the opportunity to do things that are less expected.
You'll notice that I have a particular tendency and affinity for large sprawling, difficult installations.
[Laughs]
It's because I feel like if we can't make that happen, then who can? Institutions have to take the risk of supporting these kinds of works that the market doesn't. Because otherwise, they'll never see the light of day.
Charlotte Burns:
So what if you could advise other collectors thinking of creating something?
Emily Rales:
Buy what you love. Simple. Plain and simple. You might love something different from what I love. And also don't buy something because it's really hot in the moment because the heat of the market is actually very elusory and ephemeral. Once the value of something comes down, you still have to love it. It's like your child, you know, they behave badly, they behave well. You still have to love them when they behave badly at the end of the day.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
It's like my mom said, “I always love you, but I don't always like you.”
Emily Rales:
Yes. Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
You have also the big Ellsworth Kelly show coming up. The centennial of his birth, and it's a major survey show opening in May. It's gonna travel to Paris to the Fondation Louis Vuitton next spring. Then it's gonna go to the Fire Station in Doha in Qatar that autumn—which will be the first time Ellsworth Kelly's been in that region. It's gonna feature 70 works from your collection, as well as major museum lenders.
So this seems to be another hinge moment in Glenstone's trajectory in which it's not just a show of works from the collection, and it is this big international collaboration. How did that come about, and is that something you see happening more as the museum evolves?
Emily Rales:
I'm really proud of what we've been able to do. And this survey show will be exactly that. It will include not just the paintings that we know and love of Ellsworth’s but also sculptures. He was a very prolific sculpture maker. He also made a lot of drawings. He made photographs. Things that people haven't really associated with the artist's output before. We'll put them all together in one exhibition so you can see the entire range of what he was preoccupied with in his lifetime.
Charlotte Burns:
Would you like to do more of those things? Working in that way, in that constellation in a different way? Because so often in the constellation, you are the supporting institution in this, you're a partner institution in a different way.
Is that something you'd like to do more of?
Emily Rales:
Let's see how this goes.
[Laughs]
I mean, it's been great so far, but we still have to get the show up and we have to execute. So I can't say one way or the other, but maybe we can talk in a year, and I'll give you my answer then.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
I feel like the registrar background is gonna come in really happy here.
Emily Rales:
Yeah, exactly.
Charlotte Burns:
You talked about the collection and it's growing in more than 2,000 works in there. And you also mentioned Crystal Bridges, which has the building bridges initiative of sharing collections. I know you loan a lot of your works and you've outgrown your storage, and you've also said you don't wanna keep things hidden in cellars. How do you think about where the collection goes and do you ever deaccession as well?
Emily Rales:
We do think about where the collection will go, and this is why we rarely turn down loan requests. I learned recently that we're in the minority. That a lot of collectors and institutions really deliberate a long, long time with every loan request and frequently turn them down. And I'm thinking that's odd. Whenever I get a loan request, unless the thing is very fragile or it's up on view, I always approve it. I really believe that is our responsibility as a repository of these artworks to have them seen by the public wherever they may go.
How we think about getting more of the collection seen is a difficult problem to solve because we are doing this traveling exhibition, but it's only gonna be 70 works. And we don't like to rotate very frequently. Our temporary exhibitions here, we want people to have the opportunity to come over and over again and gain different perspectives every time they come. So a show is up here, typically 12 to 18 months, which is a really long time. You wouldn't see that at a typical institution.
Charlotte Burns:
So would you grow? I mean, the last time you expanded was with the Serra building in 2022 for the monumental sculpture, Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017), which is the third large-scale Serra at Glenstone.
So you haven't expanded in a year or so, would you do more expansions?
Emily Rales:
It's a question we're asking ourselves, and there are many pros and cons. The thing that we would get immediately is more space to show more art. And that's a wonderful thing, but it comes at a cost. By that I mean it will expand the number of buildings here at Glenstone. We're already a big place. It's hard to get from one place to another. You have to walk. You need to take the time. There's something really beautiful about this notion that you can travel throughout Glenstone in one visit and you can see everything. Now, it takes about three hours. If you wanna build in time for a rest, then it's about four hours. Do we wanna turn this into a place that you need six hours to see from beginning to end? And I don't know the answer to that. I think it could be too much.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. Do you deaccession works?
Emily Rales:
We deaccession very, very rarely. And when we do, it's because we found an example that is better than the one that we already own. And I can't even remember the last time we did it, to be honest. It's been years.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you have a personal collection that is separate to the Glenstone foundation?
Emily Rales:
Yes, and it’s very small. And it’s only because we sometimes like to live with some art and because we can’t hang the foundation art in our private home. We’ve left a few works in the personal collection just so that we can do that. But it’s a handful.
Charlotte Burns:
You are also on the board of a few different places and have been on different boards. We mentioned the Heizer, which is the Triple Aught Foundation, which owns and operates City in Nevada. And you're also on the board of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Would you ever build a board similarly? Is that something you're thinking about?
Emily Rales:
Yes, absolutely. It's gonna be happening in the next five or 10 years, I believe, maybe sooner. I increasingly think that we need a brain trust to help us think and imagine the future. And this is exciting to bring in other perspectives and ideas to imagine what the future will look like for Glenstone. And one day, I will step away from being Glenstone's director. I've loved doing it. I love the work. I come here every day. It doesn't feel like work. But it's time for other ideas and other leadership styles to make their mark on Glenstone.
Charlotte Burns:
That's really exciting. What do you think about? Which boards do you think work well?
Emily Rales:
Small ones.
[Laughter]
Really. Small ones, ones that are focused. Mitch, who sits on the National Gallery board, there's only five trustees. And, uh, it functions very, very well because everybody does a little bit of everything. It's not too unwieldy, not too many voices in the room. And we're so targeted. We know what we want, that each board member will have a particular set of skills to bring to the conversation. We're not gonna be recruiting board members for funding. So it's truly just competencies. That's the reason why we would keep it very small.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also really interesting because it's kind of in line with some kind of movement within certain quarters of museum world where there's this push to separate governance from funding. Is that a model you think works?
Emily Rales:
Yes. And once you bring funding into it, it muddies the waters because then you're beholden to the funding, the sources of funding. Governance should really be about the institutions and what's best for the institution regardless of where the money's coming from. In an ideal world.
Charlotte Burns:
Which isn't the world we're in.
[Laughter]
Emily Rales:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
So, I'm really excited to walk around the grounds of Glenstone and see more. But before I go, some ‘what ifs.’ What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night, and what's the one that motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
Emily Rales:
So I was thinking about this over the past few days, and there are so many but the one that I would offer is, what if children, students made art as central to their learning as they did math and English. What if it became a priority for educators to put art at the forefront and use it as a vehicle for learning different subjects—social studies, for instance, or even sciences? What if we could truly integrate all these different disciplines rather than siloing them so that everyone comes out with a liberal arts education, which I credit as having given me the flexibility, the cognitive flexibility to take on all these things that I've done in my life.
Charlotte Burns:
That's something that came up in an interview with Paul Chan. He talked about the way that art gives you survival skills. He said it helps you fill in forms better, helps you recognize patterns better. It's a different kind of skill to learn, to think about art, live with art.
Emily Rales:
Yeah. And it gives you critical thinking skills. It gives you abstract connection skills. I don't know how else to put it, but I think if you've been trained to think like an artist, you're more likely to make those neuro-connections, those unlikely connections between certain ideas because we like to create taxonomies in our learning and in the facts and figures that we digest. Like, “Oh, well, that's algebra, that is physics, that is statistics,” what have you. But in truth, that is just our way of trying to rationalize all the inputs that we receive as human beings. Art is one of the few disciplines that draws these complicated connections between all those different things—sociology, anthropology, science—and we need more of that thinking in today's world where it's going to be an ideas economy. We can't make everything an assembly line. That kind of economy is dying out.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. It's not future focused ever because it's only ever about what we already know.
What if you could change one thing about the art world, what would it be?
Emily Rales:
Make it less about the market and more about the artists.
Charlotte Burns:
What if there was some seismic thing that happens at Glenstone and you can only put a blanket around one of the…because I would say pick up and carry, but you probably couldn’t do that. I know I asked you earlier if you had favorites. You said no.
[Laughter]
But I'm asking you the same question in a different way. What would you save? What if you could only save one? Which one?
Emily Rales:
My answer is not going to be a straight answer. I'm gonna say that I'm gonna go to work on creating a protective dome in case there's some sort of catastrophic event that happens in our little neck of the woods in Maryland. And that dome is gonna settle on top of the whole campus. And we can have this kind of like moon colony and continue to live forever. I can't even think about this place going away.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Which are the works that you just love to look at over and over again?
Emily Rales:
We bought a Pierre Bonnard painting recently, and it's in the personal collection. It's in our bedroom. And it is ravishing, and it's one of those paintings that I can look at over and over again. I mean, I don't never wanna have it leave, but it is going on loan somewhere soon.
But it's outside the scope of the collection so I can just admire it without limitation because I don't have to think about it being prioritized for any exhibition here. Because I don't think it'll ever be shown here.
Charlotte Burns:
So you don't have to think of it as your…
Emily Rales:
It's pure love.
Charlotte Burns:
It's not your director's hat.
Emily Rales:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
You're not putting it to work.
Emily Rales:
No, no. It's like I can be a grandparent and I can just dot on it without any repercussions.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Emily, thank you so much for giving me this time and for this experience of visiting Glenstone.
Emily Rales:
It's been great to have you here. Enjoy the rest of your walks today.
Charlotte Burns:
I will. I'm not sure, you'll probably find me here tomorrow.
Emily Rales:
Good. Come back tomorrow.
Charlotte Burns:
I’ll miss my flight.
[Laughter]
[Crunch of gravel]
Charlotte Burns:
So, we’re taking the trail around Glenstone. It’s a huge campus. You walk in, there’s the arrival hall, and Emily took me all around the pavilions, which was the expansion in 2018.
I’ve just been to the gallery, which was the building that opened Glenstone in 2006. And now, I’m walking in nature, as you can hear from the rustling leaves and the breeze.
[Birds chirping]
Passed a wonderful Richard Serra and the ideal is to slow down.
[Crunch of gravel]
Which I’m not very good at. But it is calming. It also smells good.
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks so much to Emily Rales for that generous tour of Glenstone. Join us next episode. We’ll be gathering our editorial advisors Deana Haggag, Jay Sanders, and Mia Locks to talk to them about the show so far—what’s been uncovered and what hasn’t been said. That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?!