When the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., launched Art Across the Nation last spring, it wasn’t clear how long the initiative to lend artworks from its collection to regional American museums would last. At the time, the NGA—with financial support from billionaire art collector and museum trustee Mitchell Rales—committed to lend up to ten artworks to ten partner institutions in in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, covering expenses related to travel, installation, insurance, and marketing.
Now, Rales has stepped up with an additional $116 million donation to endow Art Across the Nation in perpetuity. (Rales and his brother, Steven Rales, founded the science and technology company Danaher Corporation in 1984.) Rales has been collecting contemporary art since the 1980s, much of which makes up the collection at Glenstone, a private museum in Potomac, Maryland, that Rales founded with his then-wife, Emily Wei Rales, in 2006.
The gift is timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the founding of America. “I have long admired the National Gallery’s commitment to national service and sharing artistic excellence with all people,” Rales said in a statement.
Rales has been a trustee of the National Gallery since 2006 and served as president of the board from 2019 to 2024. “We have an incredible asset base in the form of 160,000 works of art, most of which end up in storage for long periods of time, because you just can’t show it all,” Rales told the New York Times. “And so I started to say, ‘What do we need to do to put the word “national” into the National Gallery of Art?’”
The first cycle of Art Across the Nation’s two-year loans—which brought, for example, paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, and Nancy Graves to the Anchorage Museum of Art and a portrait by Rembrandt to the Denver Art Museum—will wrap up in 2027; the next cycle will run from 2027 to ’29, with new partner museums to be announced.
