While much of Washington, DC, is focused on a different presidential election, this week the National Gallery of Art (NGA) revealed that its trustees have elected Darren Walker, most recently the president of the Ford Foundation in New York, to be the gallery’s next board president. Walker begins his new role immediately, succeeding the businessman, philanthropist and collector Mitchell P. Rales, who was elected board president of the NGA at the same time that Walker joined as a trustee in 2019.
“I look forward to working closely with Darren, who brings a strong vision and knowledge into the role at a vital and exciting time in the National Gallery’s trajectory,” Kaywin Feldman, the NGA’s director, said in a statement. “Mitch’s steadfast leadership as a trustee for 18 years, with the past five years as president, has been a model of service to the National Gallery and our nation. He is a true ambassador for the civic and creative life of our society. Working in partnership with him has been invaluable. I, along with the entire board, am extremely grateful that he will remain an active member of the board.”
Walker has helmed the Ford Foundation since 2013, during which time its visual-art programme has gained new prominence. He has championed the foundation’s pursuit of social-justice philanthropy, while also partnering with the NGA to create an acquisition fund for the gallery. That fund provided support to the NGA’s 2022 presentation of Afro-Atlantic Histories, a major travelling exhibition that originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Brazil in 2018.
Prior to his time at the Ford Foundation, Walker was the chief operating officer at the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem and the vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. He serves on the boards of several high-profile visual and performing arts organisations, including the High Line, Art Bridges, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies.
Rales and his wife, Emily Wei Rales, founded the Glenstone Museum, a private institution in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. The couple contributed significantly to the refurbishment of the NGA’s East Building, and their Glenstone Foundation has supported several important acquisitions by the gallery, including its first painting by a Native American artist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s I See Red: Target (1992) in 2020, as well as major sculptures by Simone Leigh and Katharina Fritsch. (Rales is also a member of the group that acquired Washington’s professional American-football team, the Commanders, last year.)
In addition to Walker and Rales, the NGA’s board of trustees includes the philanthropist David Rubenstein (who will remain as chairman of the board), the educator and philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Indra Nooyi, a former chief executive of PepsiCo. The board also has four ex-officio trustees, including the Smithsonian Institution Secretary (Lonnie G. Bunch III), the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court (John Roberts), the Secretary of State (currently Antony Blinken) and the Secretary of the Treasury (currently Janet Yellen). Pending the outcome of that other presidential election, some of those ex-officio trustees are likely to change.
