Glenstone Museum has a large collection that’s constantly in flux. Works are loaned out or given away at a steady clip, and they can be spotted in museums globally, like a Mark Rothko piece that’s on tour in Paris for a show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton; closer to home, Katharina Fritsch’s “Hahn/Cock” (better known as the blue rooster) was permanently given to the National Gallery of Art in 2021 after an extended visit on the building’s roof. The Glenstone’s Pavilion buildings offer several rooms dedicated to single artists that rotate regularly, where their work may be appreciated on its own.
The new exhibition Iconoclasts remixes the collection, drawing from the museum’s roughly 2,000 works, and arranging them in a loosely chronological order that brings more than 50 disparate artists together. The gallery building that houses Iconoclasts has for the past several iterations featured solo exhibitions of artists such as Faith Ringgold, Roni Horn, Louise Bourgeois, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, but the first several exhibits in the space provide a wider overview of the collection, so Iconoclasts represents something of a return to form. This presentation will also often change up the selection of works, and will run long term, with no official end date planned.
“There are some works that are familiar favorites and were included in past exhibitions,” says assistant curator Mia Matthias. “Anyone who comes to see this, there are works that are on view for the first time. They’ll be surprised even if they have been before.”
On display for the first time are a series of works on paper by Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist and mystic who worked with abstraction as early as the 1890s, predating artists traditionally credited with originating the art movement. “This is such a treasure, and it feels like starting with a bang,” Matthias says. Af Klint’s work has surged in popularity decades after her death, and early last year Glenstone was the first U.S. institution to acquire her work. The museum’s cofounder and chief curator Emily Wei Rales has expressed a desire to increase 2023’s attendance by 30 percent over last year, and spokesperson Erica Bogese says they are on track to meet that goal—a suite of af Klint’s works could be enough to draw crowds on its own.
Glenstone has largely boosted its holdings with postwar art created from the 1940s onward, but this exhibit stretches the time period to include works from the early part of the 20th century. “Tree of Knowledge” by af Klint was created from 1913 to 1915, and the hallway outside the first room holds a line of busts by Henri Matisse made from 1910 to 1913, arranged from most to least realistic looking. Assistant curator Yuri Stone explains that “it’s this transformation from a very literal bust of a woman, Jeannette, and it progressively becomes more and more abstract. Through the whole exhibition, there’s kind of this push and pull between abstraction and figuration.”
Iconoclasts’ chronological arrangement breaks down genre distinctions that have kept artists siloed with their most analogous contemporaries. Museums are often organized around artists who all contributed to a school of thought or work in the same media, but artists rarely work in such a vacuum, and draw inspiration from outside their immediate spheres.
“It feels like we’re creating dialogues that may not necessarily have been established in art history,” Matthias says. “It’s nice to have a self-taught artist [like Bill Traylor] in the same room with other artists who are trained as engineers [such as Alexander Calder].” Matching artists who haven’t previously been compared can offer a fresh context for the work, and bring out unexpected similarities.
Glenstone has gained a reputation for its quiet atmosphere designed for slowly and thoughtfully contemplating the works, sometimes drawing comparisons to a monastery for art, which could seem unapproachable by some. “I can see someone being intimidated by seeing some of these great iconic works, but sometimes the great iconic work is just kind of funny and cute,” says Matthias. She points to Nam June Paik’s “Robot K-456,” a whimsical droid that was once fully operational (and could even cross streets and simulate going to the bathroom) that now looks a little worse for wear. Stone mentions that “this is so not a Glenstone aesthetic, to have a rusted, dirty thing.”
The robot is so obsolete that it would likely be impossible to get it working as originally designed, but other pieces come with a host of challenges for conservation and presentation. Bruce Nauman’s “Good Boy Bad Boy,” a wall-size installation of word art made out of neon tubing that flashes in different configurations, was originally programmed on a floppy disc and hadn’t been out of storage in almost a decade, requiring some equipment upgrades. “Untitled (Lover Boys)” by Felix Gonzalez–Torres is an installation of a pile of candies weighing 355 pounds (the combined weight of the artist and his partner Ross Laycock before Laycock died of AIDS), which is depleted and replenished as visitors take the candy. The candy maker Gonzalez-Torres originally used is out of business, so Glenstone staff had to hunt down a new one who could replicate the original mint flavor, blue and white swirl design, and clear cellophane. Others are works on paper that can only be exposed to light for six months or so at a time, but this works well for the ongoing flux of the show. As Matthias says, “We don’t have to get too hung up on not being able to include one piece because we might add in six months.”
There is certainly enough work in Glenstone’s collection to present nearly endless permutations of Iconoclasts. As reported by Bloomberg, 2021 tax returns show that Glenstone cofounder and billionaire businessman Mitchell Rales made a gift of $1.9 billion to his Glenstone Foundation, bringing its net assets to a worth of $4.6 billion—just shy of the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the biggest and most-visited museum in the U.S., and translates to an enormous body of work from which to draw: Not bad for a local museum made good. Iconoclasts currently hosts a regional connection with a piece by sculptor Anne Truitt, who lived in D.C. from 1948 until her death in 2004. Matthias correctly points out that, “it’s nice to have folks that are local.”
Iconoclasts: Selections from Glenstone’s Collection is on long-term view at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac. Open Thursday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. glenstone.org. Free, but tickets are required.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the current size the Glenstone’s collection.