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A private contemporary art museum in the US has received a US$1.9bn endowment, one of the largest arts donations ever made, from US businessman Mitchell Rales
Lauren Heath-Jones | Planet Attractions | 03 Mar 2023
The Glenston Foundation is a private art museum based in Maryland, US Credit: AFP
The Glenstone Foundation, a private contemporary art museum in Maryland, US, has received an endowment of US$1.9bn (€1.7bn, £1.5bn) from billionaire businessman Mitchell Rales.
The donation brings the foundation’s net assets to US$4.6bn (€4.3bn, £3.8bn) – almost the same as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – and represents one of the largest arts donations ever made, dwarfing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ US$200m (€188m, £166m) donation gifted to The Smithsonian in 2021.
“An endowment like that means the museum can exist in perpetuity,” Evan Beard, executive VP of Masterworks, a platform that enables investors to buy and sell shares in fine art, told Bloomberg.
So far, the donation has been used to cover operating costs, facilities maintenance, acquisitions, and building projects including a new 4,000sq ft (372sq m) building to house a sculpture by Richard Serra.
The museum has also made several multi-million-dollar donations to other institutions including the Nevada-based Triple Aught Foundation and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Co-founded by Rales and his wife - art historian and curator Emily Wei Rales - in 2006, The Glenstone Foundation showcases pieces from the couple’s private collection of modern and contemporary art, which includes works from Robert Gober, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden and Charles Ray. It will continue to acquire and display artworks by the artists represented in the collection following the Rales’ deaths.
It is also one of several privately-owned US foundations raising questions about whether the personal and tax advantages afforded to founders outweigh the benefits to the public. In 2015 it was of 11 institutions scrutinised by the Senate committee over its nonprofit status. Factors examined include operating hours, whether they advertised their opening times to the public and the extent to which founders contributed to daily operations.
Museums and galleries
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