Emily Wei Rales

EO

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the past is always rewritten through the present. With Glenstone, there’s the public narrative—the privacy, the endowment, the milestones—but there are also the quieter, private logics: the impulses, recognitions, and decisions that shaped you and its beginning. I’m curious if you can speak to that, not as a polished origin story, but as it actually unfolded. How did this really start?

EWR

Officially, the story begins when Mitch started collecting in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t calculated or strategic in the way people sometimes assume. He likes to say that he had a house with empty walls and needed something to live with, and in many ways that’s true. Collecting was something that started as a hobby, one driven by curiosity rather than ambition. But once he began looking seriously—regularly going to New York, meeting an art advisor, asking questions—he immediately encountered the blue-chip canon and quickly became familiar with its operating logic.

EO

And his eye went straight to abstraction.

EWR

Very quickly. That’s what you see when you walk into major galleries or auction houses: the big names present themselves first immediately. He realized he was drawn to abstraction, especially Abstract Expressionism, and that’s a pretty ambitious entry point if you think about it. Initially it was Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko—those are heavy coordinates to start with. The first major work he acquired was a Pollock, followed by de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and then Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly. These names are the monumental heavy hitters, though mostly men, but at the time they were simply the framework that revealed itself to him as a first-time collector. Even then, though, he was discerning—not aggressive, not casual, but intentional, and only interested in housing the strongest examples of a given artist’s work and legacy.

EO

And he lived with the work.

EWR

He lived with everything. For him, it wasn’t an intellectual exercise; it was emotional and intuitive, and the collection became part of his interior life. After seven or eight years, it reached a point where he wanted to share it, but his existing house, at the time, couldn’t support that kind of engagement. He was already working with Charles Gwathmey on a new house because the Tudor home he had was too traditional to hold the work properly. With Charlie, the thinking became spatial very quickly: the artwork comes first, and the architecture becomes its vessel. That idea was seeded there, long before Glenstone existed as such.

EO

I had a similar shock and question about the architecture when I first came here—there's an immediacy and intensity to it all. Your relationship to site-specificity and purpose-built structures seem integral to Glenstone’s DNA. So few institutions can build and present a body of art in this way and at this scale.

EWR

Yes, building around art—not metaphorically, but literally—was foundational for us. I don’t think Mitch fully realized at the time how transformative that collaboration with Gwathmey would be, but in hindsight it defined how we think about display today and generally approach architecture. The artwork determines the environment, and the architecture exists in service to it.

EO

When did you enter the picture?

EWR

I came in 2005, about fifteen years into Mitch’s collecting practice. My background could not have been more different from his, because I came up as a gallery kid. I started at Gladstone Gallery, answering phones, writing press releases, working directly with artists, and learning the metabolism of contemporary art from the inside. That experience shaped how I understand artists, institutions, and the fragile ecosystem that connects them.

EO

How did this experience inform your relationship to discipline and collaborating with artists?

EWR

For me, discipline means cutting out noise so that an artist’s vision can be represented as purely as possible. That sounds simple, but it’s actually very difficult to execute on an institutional level. Artists make work in the sealed environment of their studios, which function like private laboratories, and you can never fully replicate that condition in an exhibition space, but you can try to honor it. A large part of that discipline involves removing curatorial ego, which is often the loudest form of interference in any professional working relationship.

EO

Is your understanding of discipline informed by parts of your adolescence?

EWR

Yes, my childhood taught me rigor in a very traditional sense, because I studied classical ballet rather than contemporary dance. Everything was codified, hierarchical, and exacting, and discipline meant following instructions and honoring the form. We were taught to submit ourselves to something that existed long before us, and I learned to live inside that structure without questioning its authority, but instead, I remained interested in learning its logic. There was a clear sense of right and wrong and our job was to align ourselves with it as a new standard. That training stays with you, whether you consciously draw on it or not.

My understanding and relationship to faith—the absolute belief that an artist’s vision should be honored—came later, and again it came through Barbara Gladstone. Watching her work was transformative for me, because she went to bat for artists whose ambitions were wildly complex and often difficult to communicate with external parties. She believed in their visions fully, even when they were hard to sell, easy to misunderstand, or resistant to simplification. That kind of commitment left a deep impression on me. It showed me what it looks like to stand behind an artist without apology. Matthew Barney is a perfect example of that philosophy in action. His universe is entirely self-contained, with its own language, mythology, and internal logic. Being involved with the staging of Cremaster cycle at the Guggenheim felt like witnessing a world being born rather than a work being installed. It didn’t simply meet a moment in time; it created one. That experience fundamentally changed how I understood the scale and ambition art could hold.

But it wasn’t Matthew who fully converted me to the idea that the artist is always right; it was Thomas Hirschhorn. When we did Cavemanman, at Gladstone, he transformed the Chelsea gallery into a cardboard cave that was raw, messy, and covered in packing tape. It felt urban and feral at once, like a provisional shelter built out of urgency rather than polish. The installation was filled with images of brutality, injustice, and war, and it anticipated conversations we now describe as social justice long before that language became common. It was hauntingly overwhelming, confrontational, and deeply uncompromising. I was the point person on that project, and I lived inside that installation for weeks. The labor, the audacity, and the totality of the environment forever changed me. Art stopped being an object that you encounter briefly and became a world you enter and inhabit. From that point on, there was no separating the work from the conditions that produced it. That shift has informed everything I’ve done since.

EO

At what point did you begin thinking not just about art’s history, but about your role in shaping its future? You’re Canadian, and you carry an outsider’s perspective that I think is productive for shaping a major American institution. I’ve always felt that cultures understand themselves most clearly when viewed from slightly outside their own mythology—outsiders tend to notice structures that insiders take for granted. How has that position informed your sense of institutional authorship and responsibility?

EWR

I think a minority perspective is inherently useful, because it forces a constant awareness of systems that others might move through unconsciously. Recently, while preparing for a conversation with Darren Walker, I looked up the definition of democracy, which was a grounding exercise for me. At its core, democracy is about rule of law rather than individual rule, about equality and inclusion, and about majority participation rather than power concentrated in the hands of a select few. For a culture to function democratically, minority voices have to speak, and they have to be heard without being flattened or tokenized. That idea has stayed with me as I think about institutions and their obligations.

Museums, in particular, have an enormous mandate in this regard, whether they choose to acknowledge it. They are sites of validation and can provide restitution; places where culture is sanctified and made durable. Centuries from now, people will look at what museums chose to preserve, display, and elevate in order to understand who we believed ourselves to be. That responsibility is not symbolic; it is material and consequential. It shapes the historical record in ways that are very difficult to undo or interpret.

EO

There’s an innate tension between honoring an artist’s vision absolutely and keeping the institution porous enough to evolve. Permanence can be generative, but it can also become restrictive if it hardens too quickly. I’m interested in how you intervene in what Glenstone is becoming without freezing it in place. How do you stay responsive while working at that scale?

EWR

The permanent installations are actually the clearest example of that tension, because they impose very real limits. A Michael Heizer building will never host another artist, and that’s something we had to accept fully. Once you make that decision, it forces you to rethink everything else around it. We had to reimagine the rest of the program in order to maintain movement, flexibility, and openness.

Initially, we imagined temporary exhibitions staying up for as long as two years, with the idea that visitors would return repeatedly and see how a work shifted over time. Conceptually, that felt aligned with our values, but practically it didn’t work. The math was unforgiving: if exhibitions stayed up that long, too many artists would be excluded from the program. In order to remain dynamic and equitable, we needed more consistent turnover. Now, some exhibitions last around three-quarters of a year, while others stay longer out of necessity rather than intention. The Alex Da Corte exhibition, for example, was enormously complex to produce, so extending its run made sense practically. Every decision at Glenstone involves calibration rather than adherence to a fixed rule. The guiding question is always what serves the artist best within the constraints we’ve chosen.

EO

I want to stay with that idea of reference points, because it feels like Glenstone exists in relation to institutions that predate it while also quietly refusing their logics. When people try to situate Glenstone, they often reach for comparisons—MoMA, the Whitney—but those analogies feel insufficient. There’s something about Glenstone that doesn’t quite fit the encyclopedic or urban model, even though it’s clearly in dialogue with that history. How does Glenstone understand its relationship to existing institutions—and which institutions, if any, feel closest to you intellectually or structurally?

EWR

I do think of museums as peers, but not necessarily the large encyclopedic ones that people default to in these conversations. Institutions like ICA Boston or the Studio Museum feel closer to us, because they’re grappling with similar questions of mission, stewardship, and responsibility within constraints. They’re not trying to be everything to everyone, and there’s an intentionality there that I recognize. Those institutions understand themselves as specific rather than total, and that specificity creates room for more depth.

One of your earlier questions framed it in a way that really stayed with me: what problem was Glenstone designed to solve? That’s a useful lens, because it shifts the conversation away from scale or prestige and toward purpose. Museums are extraordinary civic spaces, but they rarely produce an experience of stillness. Visitors often move through them the way they move through cities—quickly, overstimulated, and constantly negotiating crowds. We wanted to restore something that felt increasingly rare: awe without pressure, reflection without instruction, and comfort without distraction. Glenstone was designed to create the conditions for interiority, to allow visitors to move slowly enough to notice what they’re actually feeling. That’s not a rejection of other models, but it is a deliberate alternative. In that sense, Glenstone isn’t trying to compete so much as to coexist.

EO

That language of interiority keeps resurfacing, and it makes me think about meditation—not metaphorically, but literally. There’s a discipline to slowing down, to silence, to suspending the constant demand for interpretation or response. Glenstone feels built around that discipline, almost as if the institution itself is practicing restraint. How conscious is that discipline of restraint for you, and does spirituality—or a meditative practice—play a role in shaping the experience Glenstone offers?

EWR

It matters to me a great deal, and I don’t shy away from naming it. I’m a spiritual person, and I believe that dimension of experience is essential, even if it’s difficult to articulate. Glenstone is built as much for that register as it is for art, architecture, or landscape. The slowness, the silence, and the suspension of constant stimulation are all part of creating space for something inward to happen from your arrival to departure. Meditation, in the most literal sense, is about attention—where it goes, how it settles, and what it reveals when it’s not being pulled in every direction and that’s very much how we think about the visitor experience here. We’re not asking people to arrive with a particular belief system, but we are inviting them to exist in a different rhythm, as we’ve learned that when the body slows down, the mind often follows.

For us, that’s why the landscape, the architecture, and the art are so carefully choreographed and bound together. They work alongside one another to orient the body before the intellect takes over. Ideally, by the time someone encounters a work, they’re already in a receptive state and that’s not incidental; it’s foundational to how Glenstone is intended to function.

EO

It makes me think about how certain European institutions feel both new and already historical at the same time, as if they’re constantly being rewritten in real time. In that sense, Glenstone feels like it has rewritten not just its own history, but a larger institutional past. Do you experience it that way?

EWR

I never set out to rewrite anything, and I still resist that framing instinctively. It wasn’t a conceptual project in that sense, and there was no theory guiding us from the outset. Everything emerged from embodied experience rather than abstraction. I moved from what I felt and observed before I ever tried to name it. When I read your questions, I worried they might make it seem as though everything had been premeditated, as if I had a fully articulated framework before we began. That wasn’t the case at all. The decisions were intuitive, responsive, and often provisional. Looking back, a logic has become visible, but it wasn’t one we imposed in advance.

What grounded everything were lived encounters with art that produced real physical and emotional responses. Those moments came first, and the institutional thinking followed. If there’s a coherence now, it’s because we stayed close to those experiences rather than abstract ideals. That’s the only way it ever felt honest to proceed.

EO

I want to return to the bodily register you’re describing, because it feels like the hidden engine behind so many of these decisions. You mentioned earlier the experience of standing beside Michael Heizer’s work at Dia. Can you describe how that moment recalibrated your sense of what art could do?

EWR

That experience at Dia was pivotal for me, and it began very simply by standing next to Michael Heizer’s work and feeling suspended between astonishment and real physical risk. Your body recognizes something destabilizing before your intellect can intervene, and that recognition is unmistakable. Those pits are genuinely dangerous, and you feel it in your stomach as much as in your mind. It wasn’t just awe; it was an awareness of vulnerability and scale operating simultaneously. That moment recalibrated my understanding of what art could do to a person in space.

From that point on, I became deeply interested in encounters that operate at that pre-verbal level. Everything we’ve done since has been grounded in lived experience rather than theoretical positioning. The artists who shaped me—Heizer, Barney, Hirschhorn, and many others I encountered through Barbara—were always expanding the definition of what art could be and how it could function. They weren’t content with objects that stayed politely on the wall; they were building environments, systems, and propositions that demanded bodily engagement. That insistence has stayed with me as a guiding principle.

It led me to keep asking a persistent question: if artists are continually pushing the frame, why shouldn’t museums do the same? We tend to think of museums as repositories for important objects, places of preservation and containment, but those definitions feel insufficient when art itself is unstable, expansive, and relational. Why not complicate the museum’s role instead of stabilizing it? Why not let the institution be shaped by the same pressures that shape the work?

EO

And that pressure shows up most clearly in how you place works in relation to one another. Glenstone doesn’t announce its arguments loudly, but the juxtapositions are doing a lot of work. There’s a subtle decisiveness to how artists are allowed to share space, even when that proximity isn’t historically sanctioned. It feels like a quiet revision of the canon rather than a confrontational one. How intentional that strategy is for you. Is that where your authorship enters most directly?

EWR

When we opened the Pavilions, the inaugural hang included the canonical names people would expect, but it also made space for conversations that hadn’t been allowed to happen before. We placed Pop alongside Minimalism, Warhol next to Rauschenberg, and then Jasper Johns beside Faith Ringgold. At the time, that juxtaposition was not common, and certainly not neutral. But it revealed something essential about both artists that might have remained obscured otherwise. The room held that conversation because the architecture allowed it to. The scale didn’t monumentalize the work or guard it behind spectacle. Instead, it created a context where those dialogues could unfold quietly and persistently. That’s where the European sensibility comes in for me, where rooms are proportioned to make work feel unguarded rather than overdetermined.

That approach isn’t about provocation for its own sake. It’s about allowing meaning to emerge through proximity and duration rather than explanation. The canon shifts not because we announce it, but because people experience it differently. Over time, those experiences accumulate into a revised understanding of what belongs together.

EO

So you’re constantly thinking through the implications and lens of architecture and its translation?

EWR

Yes, it’s fundamental here, because it orients the body before a visitor encounters a single artwork. You’re already being slowed, already being calibrated, before you even realize it’s happening. That physical orientation sets the tone for everything that follows. It’s not about imposing meaning, but about creating the conditions in which meaning can surface. In terms of curatorial logic, the collection is and will always be a long game for us as a collecting institution. It evolves slowly because it has to, and because availability and timing are never predictable. You can’t force a work to become available, and you can’t rush an artist’s process. What you can do is shape the exhibition program in real time, and that’s where we’ve been more agile.

That’s also where we’ve been able to prioritize women and artists of color more deliberately. The collection isn’t where we want it to be yet, but the program reflects where we’re going, and exhibition-making becomes a way of signaling intent without waiting for the long arc of collecting to catch up. It’s a way of aligning present action with future commitment.

EO

I want to ask more directly about collecting, because it feels like the quiet infrastructure underneath everything else. When Glenstone considers a work, what questions are actually being asked, beyond desire or availability? How does strategy enter the picture without overtaking intuition?

EWR

In the early years, we showed almost exclusively from the collection, which meant that collecting and exhibition-making were tightly bound together. Over time, that shifted, especially when we began borrowing more extensively for certain exhibitions. The Ellsworth Kelly centennial retrospective was a turning point, because it required us to look beyond what we owned and think more expansively about scholarship and context, which opened the door to richer, more layered shows that couldn’t be built from our collection alone. It also clarified how borrowing, when done carefully, can deepen relationships rather than dilute them.

Our approach to collecting has always been research-driven, even if that research doesn’t always look academic from the outside. Whenever we consider a work, we ask very practical questions alongside intuitive ones. Are there other works like this, and if so, where are they located? Would placing two similar works in the same region diminish the impact of either one? Those considerations matter, because they shape how work circulates and how meaning accrues over time. By the mid-2000s, when Mitch and I were collecting together in earnest, the market was behaving in very particular ways that we were privy to respond to. Everyone else seemed to be chasing Koons at auction, responding to momentum rather than trusting their own self conviction. We focused instead on Nauman, on works that weren’t commanding attention in the same way at the time. That choice wasn’t oppositional; it was grounded in curiosity and our own beliefs. We were interested in depth rather than spectacle, and that orientation has remained consistent throughout the process of establishing the museum.

EO

How do you approach lending as a form of relationship-building? Does it change how you understand stewardship?

EWR

Lending is absolutely central to how we think about stewardship, even though it’s not always visible to the public. At any given moment, we have dozens of works out in the world, circulating through other institutions and contexts and that movement creates dialogue, not just between works, but between people at the helm of those places. Lending cultivates relationships with artists, curators, and institutions in a way that borrowing doesn’t always reciprocate. Borrowing, for us, tends to be project-specific, while lending is ongoing and relational. It signals trust and a willingness to participate in a larger ecosystem rather than remaining insular. For us, that openness is essential, because it prevents the collection from becoming inward-looking. The work needs to live beyond Glenstone in order to stay alive itself.

That philosophy also reflects how the institution itself has changed. Glenstone has outgrown its original conception as a relatively hermetic space defined primarily by the collection. Now it’s driven much more by what serves the artist best in a given moment. The question has shifted from what we want to own to what an artist needs in order for their work to resonate fully in this context.

EO

Glenstone now operates as an ecosystem rather than a singular gesture, and that brings its own complications. I’m thinking about geography here, about land, about proximity to Washington, D.C., and about the fact that this project couldn’t be assembled in the same way today. How conscious were you of that specificity as things expanded? Did the scale of the site always dictate the institution’s present and future?

EWR

The site is absolutely determinative, and you’re right that this could not be replicated now. The land was assembled in the 1980s, when that kind of opportunity still existed and the majority of the landscape originally served as a fox-hunting estate. Mitch slowly acquired parcels as they became available, long before there was any vision of developing a public institution. By the time I arrived in the early 2000s, there was already a house, the Gwathmey gallery, the Kelly totem, and the pond where the González-Torres work sits. That was phase one, even though it wasn’t named as such at the time.

EO

How did the name come forth?

EWR

Right, so Glenstone wasn’t even called Glenstone then. Mitch named it later, combining Glen Road, as that’s where we’re located, with stone, from the local stone quarries, and the name stuck because it felt elemental. Once I entered the picture, the logic began to shift from accumulation toward articulation. We started asking new questions about not just what to add, but how each addition would recalibrate the whole framework and operating system. The geography, the proximity to D.C., and the scale of the land all became active forces rather than passive backdrops.

EO

I want to stay with geography for a moment, because Glenstone’s proximity to Washington, D.C. feels quietly consequential. It’s close to the seat of American political power without being subsumed by it, and that positioning seems to matter. We touched on this earlier, but I want to return to it with more intention. How does being near D.C.—and near institutions like the Smithsonian—shape the way you understand Glenstone’s role? Is that proximity something you think about explicitly, or did it only become legible over time?

EWR

It became legible over time rather than being a conscious strategy from the beginning. Initially, the decision to build in Potomac was practical and intuitive rather than symbolic, because we weren’t thinking about Washington as the political center so much as a geographic reality. But as Glenstone evolved, it became impossible to ignore the context we were operating within by being so close to the National Mall and the Smithsonian museums. It places us in a dialogue with American ideas of power, philanthropy, and public culture.

That proximity sharpens certain questions rather than answering them. We’re close enough to feel the gravitational pull of those institutions, but far enough to resist their logics. We want it to function as a counterpoint—a space that insists on slowness, quiet, and interiority in a landscape often defined by urgency and visibility. Over time, that contrast has felt increasingly meaningful and clarifying.

EO

Hm, and there’s also a wellness dimension to all of this that feels increasingly urgent. Not wellness as branding, but wellness as a lived psychological, psychosocial, and spiritual condition. Was wellness part of the original vision, or did it emerge through practice?

EWR

It emerged through practice rather than being named upfront, but it was always there intuitively. We had a sense that art and nature paired together could promote a different kind of well-being, one that wasn’t about escape but about recalibration. Over time, that intuition was reinforced by how people responded to the experience here, as visitors often described Glenstone as a sanctuary, long before we had language.

EO

During the onset of Covid-19, many institutions had to reinvent their visitor models almost overnight—specifically, timed tickets, limited capacity, and controlled circulation. Glenstone didn’t seem to scramble in the same way. You mentioned that other museums actually reached out to you during that moment to understand how you were operating. Can you talk about that?

EWR

Yes, that did happen, and it was more sobering than affirming. We didn’t experience Covid-19 as a fundamental break in how we operated. Timed tickets, limited attendance, and a slower pace were already built into the institution. When the pandemic hit, other museums reached out not to talk about philosophy, but to ask very practical questions—how we managed reservations, how we controlled flow, how we maintained limits without turning the experience into something punitive.

What that revealed was how unprepared many institutions were to operate under constraint. Practices that had once been seen as overly restrictive suddenly became necessary. At the same time, the Covid-19 period made the potential of the wellness dimension impossible to ignore. Museums everywhere were being forced to reconsider their visitor models, their capacities, and their assumptions about crowding. We didn’t have to change much structurally, but what did change was our sense of responsibility to the public.

EO

So the model revealed itself as infrastructural rather than aesthetic.

EWR

Exactly. The systems we had in place were about care—care for visitors, staff, and artists—but during Covid-19 it became clear that they were also about responsibility. Infrastructure always carries values, whether or not institutions acknowledge them. Because we had already accepted limits, we weren’t destabilized by them when pressure arrived. During that time, we opened the grounds to healthcare workers without requiring reservations. If you worked in a hospital, you could simply come. The letters and conversations that followed were extraordinary.

People described Glenstone as a place where they could breathe again, where the accumulation of stress could briefly loosen. That experience confirmed what we had intuited all along: that art and nature together can have a real psychological and spiritual impact when they’re allowed to operate without pressure and commercial demands.

EO

Did that moment shift how you understood Glenstone’s position in relation to the field?

EWR

I wouldn’t frame it as leadership, but it did clarify something. Glenstone wasn’t just offering a different kind of experience—it had built systems that could hold under stress. That period reinforced for me that institutions need to be designed not only for ideal conditions, but for moments of strain. The systems that function most humanely in crisis are often the ones shaped by restraint from the start.

EO

What does presence mean to you now, in an environment so saturated by screens?

EWR

Our relationship to phones is guided by a deep skepticism about what constant mediation does to our ability to be present. Phones offer the illusion of connection, but they often pull us out of our bodies and away from the moment we’re actually in. At Glenstone, we ask visitors as gently as we can not to use their phones—not as a rule to be enforced, but as an invitation to notice differently. We’re trying to create conditions where people can experience art directly, without immediately translating it into an image or a performance. Presence, for me, begins with allowing the experience to remain unrecorded. There was a moment when someone on staff articulated this beautifully by saying, “We prefer that you use your eyes, not your viewfinder.” That phrasing captured exactly what we’re trying to protect.

At the same time, we’re not absolutists. We understand that digital tools can serve important functions when used thoughtfully. Covid-19 forced us to confront that reality very directly. QR codes, which we had long resisted, suddenly became a practical necessity. For artists like Jenny Holzer, whose work involves extensive textual material, digital access can actually deepen engagement rather than detract from it. So we keep the walls clean and let people who want more information access it on their own devices. The phone becomes a foothold rather than a substitute for looking.

EO

What do you think about sustainability now, both personally and institutionally, as the project continues to expand?

EWR

Sustainability, for me, is less about growth and more about calibration. It’s about understanding where my energy is best spent and where it’s depleted unnecessarily. I’ve learned that I have a limited social battery, and that loud, boisterous environments drain me rather than feed me—even though a certain amount of that engagement is necessary, because relationships matter and institutions don’t exist in isolation.

What nourishes me are moments like this: long conversations with one person, walking together, being in deep dialogue. That constitution has been grafted onto Glenstone almost without my realizing it. The visitor model here—timed tickets, limited numbers, and minimal lines—is essentially my nervous system translated into an institution. By slowing things down externally, we give people the chance to speed up internally, to notice what’s happening in their own minds and bodies.

EO

The more we’ve talked, the more it seems like this project isn’t scaling outward so much as inward—refining rather than accumulating. Does that feel accurate to you?

EWR

It does, very much. Glenstone has never been about adding more for the sake of visibility or relevance. If anything, the work has been about stripping away what isn’t essential and sharpening what remains. That kind of refinement takes time and a willingness to resist external pressures. It’s not always comfortable, but it feels honest.

As the institution has grown, the questions have become more focused rather than more diffuse. Instead of asking how we expand, we ask how we deepen. We’re not thinking about how we attract more attention; we ask how we hold attention more carefully throughout the duration of someone’s experience. That orientation has allowed Glenstone to remain coherent as it’s evolved. It’s less about becoming something else than about becoming more precise.

EO

It feels like Glenstone operates on a different temporal logic—one that values calibration over accumulation. It has the discipline of something finished and the restlessness of something still inventing itself and its own language. That feels rare, and almost quietly subversive and subcultural.

EWR

That’s exactly how it feels from the inside. We’ve always hoped that the experience would change people, even if only by a small degree. The goal was never to overwhelm or impress, but to offer something that stayed with you after you left. If people come away more attentive, more grounded, or simply more aware of how they’re moving through the world, then we’ve done what we set out to do. That kind of change doesn’t announce itself loudly, but it can accumulate over time.

EO

With some distance from our first conversation, what ideas stayed active for you afterward—or clarified in ways you didn’t anticipate?

EWR

I was reflecting on our conversation today, and I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever had a discussion about Glenstone in quite the same way. You asked questions that I honestly haven’t been asked before, because you came at it from a very different perspective. It felt much more like a meditation on the future—broad and open—rather than focused on concrete facts or sound bites. Almost every other interview I’ve ever given has stayed at that surface level, so this required a different kind of engagement. It almost felt like a kind of yogic reorganization of my psyche.

I don’t usually have the opportunity to think about Glenstone in such a wide-open context. Most of my time is spent dealing with very pedestrian, very practical concerns. I don’t often get the space to stop, take a beat, and look at the broader trajectory of the institution or our impact in the field at large. Most days, my thinking is dominated by operational questions—what HR issue needs attention, what immediate problem needs solving. That’s why I really cherish conversations like this. One of the things you noticed, which really struck me, was that the way that you said Glenstone has seemed to evolve in a way that has been very organic and that it operates almost like an extension of an artistic practice.

To a certain degree, it almost feels like an artistic practice rather than a traditionally planned institutional project. That framing helped me see our work differently, because it emphasized process rather than outcome and acknowledged and allowed me to access my intuition, its responsiveness, and gradual development more quickly instead of thinking through its fixed goals. I found that to be an incredibly generous observation—honestly, one of the highest compliments I’ve received in thinking about the institution.

EO

When you venture to other institutions as a visitor, how do you feel now?

EWR

Last week I spent a lot of time going to museums purely as a visitor, not as a VIP. I didn’t go to any openings or cocktail events—I just went in my sneakers, in the cold, to see shows. I walked through a few galleries in Chelsea, then went to MoMA to see the Ruth Asawa exhibition, and I realized how rarely I actually go there because it’s such an overwhelming experience. Even in the most beautiful installations, there’s a constant agitation—people moving quickly, taking pictures. That experience reminded me how different Glenstone feels by comparison.

That difference is a foundational part of Glenstone’s origin story. Mitch and I had experiences at places like MoMA and the Louvre that felt abrasive to our sensibilities—not because the art wasn’t extraordinary, but because the environment made it hard to be present with it. We wanted to create a space that was pure, calm, contemplative, and unhurried, where people could really settle into the experience. Going back to those museums last week reaffirmed that instinct for me. It reminded me how rare that kind of slowness actually is. After that, I went to the National Gallery of Art in D.C., again just as a civilian. I found myself standing in the West Building, in front of the Leonardo da Vinci painting, completely alone with two museum guards. If that painting were in New York, the room would have been mobbed. There was something incredibly special about being so close to the seat of American political power and still being able to find a pocket of quiet.

EO

Do you experience Glenstone as something you author, or more as something you steward now?

EWR

I feel much more like a steward than an author at this point. People often say, your fingerprints are all over this, and of course it would feel that way—it’s a lovely thing to receive—but I don’t want it to be this is not a monograph. This is not something that it should be about me or about my co-founder. My hope is that it takes on a life of its own, and I think it has, to a degree. My challenge today is to gently support its transition into that next phase where it is not as tied to us as its founders. I mean, it always will be, but in the way that we don’t think about the Whitney as the person who started it, MoMA, or the Guggenheim in terms of its founders. I want to give it as much energy as it needs as an institution, still in its very becoming, without clinging onto authorship.

EO

That makes me think about good yet bad problem with philanthropy that you mentioned earlier. or is it the confounding American-ness of it all? I’m trying to understand the deeper logic of that positioning and relationship, because it doesn’t feel accidental in retrospect. It feels like it’s doing a kind of quiet work that people don’t always name that's namely manufactured then resold.

EWR

Philanthropy is inherently complicated, and I don’t think it’s something you can approach cleanly or without contradiction. Darren Walker has spoken beautifully about this—about how American philanthropy is both a source of extraordinary possibility and a symptom of deep structural inequity. It only exists because there are gaps that shouldn’t exist at all. That paradox never goes away, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and misleading.

Often, what I try to resist is being overly binary about these questions. It’s not a matter of saying philanthropy is good or bad, or that institutions are either complicit or pure, because the reality is much more layered and complicated than that, and I think sitting with that discomfort is actually important. Glenstone exists within that tension, and we don’t pretend otherwise. Instead, we try to act responsibly within it—to be thoughtful about what we offer and how we offer it. Being near Washington, D.C. makes that context harder to ignore. We’re close to the Smithsonian and to institutions that symbolize American power, governance, and cultural ambition. Yes, right. the American-ness of the project is always present, even when it isn’t explicitly named but remains something we feel and encounter. In that sense, the proximity isn’t accidental—it’s productive. It keeps those ethical questions visible, in the main frame, and prevents us from imagining ourselves outside the systems we’re actively entangled with as governing cultural entities.

EO

One of the things I kept thinking about, in looping back to my experience of experiencing Glenstone, was its accessibility, especially in relation to my journey to Marfa, Texas, and the Chinati Foundation, with Donald Judd’s sprawling presence in and around the city. Going to Marfa is an excursion, but a meditative one. Its relative inaccessibility requires intention—you have to decide to go, to commit to getting there. That process of arrival does a kind of preparatory work. By the time you arrive, a certain urgency has already been stripped away, and you’re readied to spend time, to submit to the experience.

Glenstone operates differently, but toward a similar end. It doesn’t demand that same effort in advance, yet it cultivates a comparable state once you’re inside. Rather than requiring preparation through travel, it calls you into that mode from within the experience itself. The pacing, the walking, the intervals between encounters—all of it works to slow you down and reorient your attention. In that sense, Glenstone shares an orientation with Marfa: both create conditions that prepare you to be present, just at different moments in the encounter.

I want to stay with that question of time, because it feels central to how Glenstone operates as both a collection and an institution. You’re not just collecting works—you’re also creating conditions for how they’re encountered over long durations. In contrast to places where the work of preparation happens through travel or pursuit, here the work seems to happen within the encounter itself. How intentional is that inversion—removing the effort of arrival and placing the work inside the experience itself—and what does accessibility allow you to do differently as an institution?

EWR

I think collecting and institution-building operate on very different temporal registers, and learning to hold both at once has been one of the biggest shifts for me. Collecting is a very slow burn, and sometimes it can take five years or more to reach a particular goal. Often you don’t even know how long it will take, and in a way it doesn’t matter, because the point is patience rather than completion. We keep a wish list, we return to it, and sometimes opportunities simply aren’t ripe yet and won’t be for a long time. Whenever there’s a sense of urgency around collecting, that’s usually a red flag for us.

That’s one of the main reasons I don’t attend art fairs very often, because they intensify urgency in a way that feels unhealthy. When you’re there, everything feels like it has to happen immediately, and the pressure is relentless. There’s a kind of collective psychology that takes over, where FOMO drives decision-making and suddenly everything seems critical. I was in Paris in October, and I remember thinking that my nervous system just couldn’t handle that pace, because it’s one thing after another with no space to breathe. And the funny thing is, had I not gone, I wouldn’t have cared at all. That sense of urgency is completely fabricated, and yet it’s incredibly persuasive in the moment. The whole thing is an illusion, but it’s one that’s very easy to get swept up in when you’re surrounded by it. I’ve learned to be deeply suspicious of situations where it feels like there’s a gun to your head, metaphorically speaking. That kind of pressure almost always leads to decisions that aren’t grounded in real conviction. So we try to move slowly and deliberately, and to trust that what’s meant to come to us will come in its own time.

There are, of course, exceptions to that slowness, particularly when it comes to artists who are reaching the end of their lives. In those cases, there’s a heightened sense of responsibility to be attentive and responsive. But even then, the approach isn’t driven by frenzy; it’s driven by care. We’re in a very fortunate position where we don’t have to chase works aggressively, because Glenstone is known as a good home for art. Being the first call took time to earn, but that trust allows us to resist the constant pressure to act immediately.

EO

How did moving from New York to Potomac change your relationship to art and to the art world more broadly? How did that distance recalibrate your priorities and your sense of clarity?

EWR

Having worked on both sides of that divide gave me a kind of literacy that I still rely on. I understand what goes into a sales pitch, what goes into making a gallery exhibition, and how certain narratives are constructed behind the scenes. That knowledge was incredibly helpful early on, because it allowed us to see through certain postures or tactics that didn’t feel genuine. There were moments when a gallery would say something wasn’t for sale, and I could immediately recognize that language for what it was. Those small insights made it easier to stay grounded in what we were actually trying to do.

At the same time, the move to Potomac created a physical and psychological distance that was incredibly clarifying. Being outside of the constant churn of the art world made it easier to resist its rhythms and expectations. It allowed me to ask more fundamental questions about why we were doing this at all, and what kind of experience we actually wanted to create for ourselves and others. That distance wasn’t about withdrawal so much as being able to provide myself with a new perspective. It helped sharpen our values rather than dilute them.

EO

How does the gallery ecosystem feel most different to you now compared to when you were coming up?

EWR

I don’t consider myself an authority on the gallery world, because I don’t work inside it anymore, but it’s hard not to notice what’s been happening. There’s been a huge amount of consolidation, with larger galleries absorbing smaller ones and mid-sized galleries either closing or trying to merge in order to survive. It’s become an incredibly difficult environment for anyone who isn’t operating at a very large scale. Some of my closest friends started galleries and did quite well for a period of time, but sustaining that success long-term has become almost impossible under current conditions. The financial and emotional toll of trying to compete in that landscape is enormous and all-consuming.

At the same time, social media has fundamentally changed how art is seen and understood, and I don’t think there’s any going back from that. So much of what people encounter now is mediated through screens before it’s ever experienced in person, and that shift has inevitably shaped aesthetic sensibilities. What a painting should look like, what gathers the most likes. You’ve seen this in all kinds of things, and you’re in design and furniture—I mean, is it just me or is it that a lot of design looks the same now, because we’re all looking at the same feeds. When the fuel for the engine is online attention, it inevitably shapes what kinds of work are rewarded, and that pressure filters into the broader culture in subtle but powerful ways.

EO

Yes, it feels like that logic extends far beyond galleries, though into every field. There’s a kind of typology that emerges, a systems thinking that people try to plug into rather than resist. Everything becomes a brand, everything becomes transactional, and it feels like we’re witnessing the slow erosion of individual sensibility. So many people have money now, but very few have taste. [Laughs.]

EWR

I agree, and I think that sameness is one of the defining characteristics of this moment. When everyone is drawing from the same visual sources, it’s inevitable that things start to blur together. You see it across disciplines, not just in art but in design, fashion, and even institutional aesthetics. The feed becomes a kind of unspoken standard, shaping expectations about what something should look like or how it should present itself. That homogenization is deeply tied to the mechanics of visibility and reward.

For us, that’s where discernment becomes especially important. We’ve developed a pretty refined sense of what feels aligned with Glenstone and what doesn’t. Generally speaking, work that unfolds slowly, that resists immediate legibility, and that can be engaged on multiple levels tends to resonate more with us. If something feels one-note or easily exhausted conceptually, it usually isn’t a good fit. Depth, rather than declaration, is what signals longevity. That doesn’t mean we’re uninterested in work that addresses identity or cultural specificity, but instead it means we’re looking for complexity rather than reduction. Because there has to be some friction, some resistance, or something that continues to unfold over time. When a work allows for multiple readings and sustained engagement, it opens up a much richer experience for the artist, the work, and the viewer and institution. That kind of intelligence is what tells us a work belongs here.

EO

That distinction feels especially charged when you think about how practices endure, and about who is allowed to be complex over time. As a person of color, there’s often pressure to perform legibility or representation in ways that flatten what’s actually possible. Certain figures get endlessly repeated, while other forms of knowing or making remain under-recognized. It feels like there’s a deeper intelligence there that institutions are often slow to acknowledge.

EWR

I think that’s absolutely true, and it’s something we’re very conscious of. Institutions often rely on a small set of familiar names or narratives to signal relevance or commitment. That repetition can become its own shorthand, even when it no longer reflects the complexity of the field. What gets lost are the quieter practices, the ones that don’t announce themselves immediately but are doing sustained and rigorous work. Part of our responsibility is paying attention to those undercurrents and asking what hasn’t yet been given the space to unfold, but that requires patience and a willingness to sit comfortably with uncertainty. It also requires trusting audiences more than institutions sometimes do. People are capable of engaging with work that doesn’t resolve itself instantly, if the conditions allow for it. Creating those conditions is something we take very seriously and often seek out.

EO

I want to talk about leadership more directly, because it feels like it’s sitting just beneath everything we’ve been circling. So few major institutions are led by people of color, and that fact still feels both obvious and unspeakable at the same time. Do you think about it explicitly in your day-to-day life, or does it only surface in certain moments if at all?

EWR

It’s always the thing people notice first, but it’s rarely the thing anyone talks about openly. There’s a collective awareness of it, paired with a kind of deafening silence. Occasionally another woman of color will say something like, “It’s just us,” and there’s an immediate understanding there. But it’s not something my white male counterparts would necessarily bring up or even register in the same way. I don’t spend much time thinking about how different I am in relation to other museum directors, but there are moments when it becomes more visible. I think about someone like Thelma Golden, whose leadership at the Studio Museum and it being in Harlem, feels legible in a way that’s less questioned. There’s a perceived fittingness there, which makes her authority easier for people to accept. She’s an extraordinary model, not just because of what she’s accomplished, but because of the clarity with which she’s navigated those dynamics.

At the same time, I don’t think the big legacy museums are actually ready for a woman of color to lead them. Just as the country wasn’t ready for Kamala Harris, there are limits to what these institutions can currently imagine. Glenstone is a smaller, private museum, and there are people who don’t even consider us a “real” museum because of that. That perception creates a certain kind of space, but it also exposes how narrow some definitions of legitimacy still are.

EO

What does it even mean to not be considered a real museum? When you look at the histories of MoMA or the Whitney, those institutions were shaped by very specific people, money, and power structures. How do you feel now that the tide of establishing private institutions is also starting to pass?

EWR

I honestly don’t know what it means, and I try not to dwell on it. There was a whole flurry of activity around people starting private museums over the last ten years or so—the Marciano Foundation, among others—and that moment seems to have slowed down. Some of those institutions struggled to define themselves or have disappeared altogether, which I think has contributed to a broader skepticism about the model. You still see new museums emerging in Europe and Asia, but much less so in the United States right now. That shift has changed how people think about institutional legitimacy.

People don’t often come to me for guidance about starting institutions, though it does happen occasionally. I recently met with a really lovely couple from Europe who are thinking about building a museum for their collection in Germany, and those conversations are always interesting. But generally, I’m not called upon very frequently in that way. Glenstone doesn’t fit neatly into an existing category, and that uncertainty can make people uneasy. We’re legible to some and opaque to others, and I’ve learned to accept that.

EO

So what has leading Glenstone actually taught you over time—about power, politics, business, or about yourself? If you were speaking to an earlier version of yourself, what would you want them to understand?

EWR

The most important thing I’ve learned is to trust my instincts. Almost everything about Glenstone emerged from intuition first, and data later came in to support those instincts. We had a sense that people wanted a slower, more spacious experience with art, but that belief had to be tested and proven over time. Seeing it borne out has reinforced my trust in listening to the body as much as the intellect.

When urgency tries to pull me elsewhere, I pay attention to how my body responds. More often than not, it tells me to slow down and return to nature. This conversation is very intellectual, but at its core it’s deeply felt. Standing on the ground, surrounded by landscape, in the presence of a work by Simone Leigh—that’s when everything aligns for me again. In those moments, the other metrics fall away. It’s not about prestige or visibility. It’s about the quality of the experience and the care that shaped it. The longer we commit to this slow, place-based practice, the more convinced I am that we’ve made the right choices.

EO

I guess the last thing I’m trying to understand is what the reward actually is. If the fairs, the parties, and the constant circulation aren’t the point, then what continues to affirm this choice year after year?

EWR

It’s not total disillusionment, but an awareness of my limits. All of those things serve a function, and I participate when necessary. But intimacy and quiet are what sustain me. There are many ways to engage with art meaningfully, and this is the one that feels most honest to me.

EO

Is there anything you would do differently, if you could go back?

EWR

I would have built in more flexible space. With so many long-term installations, it’s not always easy to accommodate temporary exhibitions, and that requires careful planning. That’s probably the main thing I would change.

EO

And looking ahead—do you see Glenstone continuing to build, or does the structure feel largely set?

EWR

We’re building a pavilion right now for Arthur Jafa, which is very exciting. It will be a standalone structure in the landscape designed to house a single work. Construction should start next year. As for additional gallery space, that’s not something we’re planning at the moment, but I’ve learned never to say never.