A Museum Lover’s Guide to Maryland’s Glenstone

Wending your way along a curving path surrounded by waving grasses, white tufts of milkweed and green undulating hills, you might stop to watch a honey bee busy gathering pollen from a cone flower. There are few people on the path with you, so you can hear the gentle breeze blowing through goldenrod and sycamore trees. This is a warm-up to receptivity, intentionally designed to slow down each visitor to Potomac, Maryland’s Glenstone.

Around a bend in the path, when you see white monoliths against a cerulean blue sky, they might be an apparition, gleaming relics in the sunlight. At first, they appear to be made of marble, but coming closer, you can see the buildings are made up of six-foot by one-foot cement blocks. There are 25,000 in the building, each weighing 800 pounds, and the minimal, monumental architecture rises up out of a vista of native plants and flowers, promising yet more wonders.

All of this in only the first few minutes after you park your car: the expansive sky, the complexity of plant life, the towering architecture opening you to an unexpected and unfamiliar world. You were just driving through Washington, D.C., in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and then this!

The first impact of Glenstone is calming and thrilling. Here is a place without crowds because they restrict the number of visitors each hour—reservations are required. Once here, there are 300 acres where you can wander at your own pace along curving gravel paths. You need never enter a building to see art because there are outdoor sculptures all along the way. Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons and Michael Heizer created site-specific work for the museum. Works by Charles Ray, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Gober, Tony Smith, Alex da Corte, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are framed amongst trees and hills. Every piece here was collected by the founders, Emily and Mitch Rales, who created a vast collection of post-World War II art now open to the public, free of charge.

The name Glenstone comes from Glen Road and the carderock stone that’s indigenous to the area. The land used to be a fox hunting estate. In 2006, the Iconoclast building with 25,000 square feet of gallery space was inaugurated. Twelve years later, the Pavilion, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened. In the 11 rooms are 50,000 square feet of exhibition space, connected by a glass-enclosed passage looking out to an 18,000 square-foot court teeming with yellow and white water lilies, cattails, rushes and seasonally changing plants. No public funds go toward operations; all is privately funded, which protects the museum from closures like those suffered by federal art institutions during government shutdowns.

The Rales are truly visionary, giving to the public the native natural world surrounding innovative, exciting architecture and iconic art. Glenstone is a collaboration with the land and each artist. Much of the work is permanent and some of the spaces have been designed in partnership with a featured artist, as was the case with Michael Heizer’s Collapse, 1967/2016, commissioned by the museum. The piece is outdoors, framed by open sky and concrete block walls. The rusted steel sculpture is surrounded by reddish-brown rock called argillite (chosen by the artist) that matches the color of the rusted steel. The massive beams, some 42 feet long, are stacked haphazardly in a sunken cube. Moss grows and rain splatters, changing the color of the steel over time—yet another marvel of the changing artscape of Glenstone.

Inside, you come upon Simone Leigh’s sculpture, Sentinel (Mami Wata), standing over 16 feet tall, the black bronze silhouetted against the white cement with space above and around the piece. You can walk around the piece or view the work from a long distance, creating different vantage points from which to see Leigh’s vision. The same is true of much of the work at Glenstone.

Two sculptures by Roni Horn sit along another long passageway beside tall windows that allow streams of light to illuminate the heavy, large vessels. The solid cast glass cylinders, Water Double, one opaque and the other translucent, are over four feet in diameter and weigh 5,000 pounds each. Shoring poles were installed under them to hold the weight. When you look into the cylinder, they appear liquid; one a luminous pool of black void and the other of clear glass with trapped air bubbles inside, wondering how that amount and weight of glass could be cast. Horn is a multifaceted talent and deeply influenced by the Icelandic landscape.

After admiring the naturally sunlit sculptures in these vast hallways, I learn that the Pavilion rooms are placed on cardinal points to catch the movement of the sun through the tall windows. Natural light and the placement of each room and window are tantamount to understanding the attention to detail, line, dimension and material that went into the creation of Glenstone. Minimalism is hard to achieve on monumental scales, yet I found myself continually stopping in awestruck silence at the power and impact. Having so few visitors here with me also enhanced the near-religious experience of traversing these buildings.

Each room highlights the work of a single artist. In one huge room stretching outward is Brice Marden’s multipaneled Moss Sutra with the Seasons (2010-2015). Other rooms hold three On Kawara paintings from his “Today” series, as well as Jenny Holzer’s installation, The Child’s Room, with its LED signage and light projections.

My favorite room houses five Cy Twombly sculptures. His found objects are coated with white house paint and white plaster—“my marble,” he said. The large room was built for this work in collaboration with Twombly. The high-ceiling skylight and stark white walls create a monastic sensation. The few people in the room with me spoke in whispers. You are able to walk around each work to examine in depth: screws left in plywood, the drips of white house paint, the splintered plywood. One in particular is a knockout. A real palm leaf is coated with creamy white paint and sits on a block of wood, also coated in white. He liked to use plastic flowers in his sculptures, but this one is an actual palm leaf, looking ancient, a Roman relic. Twombly said, “Sculptures, I like to allow them to age.”

Again outside, walking along the path passing towering sycamore trees, you might like to stop for lunch at the café, with its seasonal menus. I had pink radish toast with whipped ricotta that was as beautiful and delicious as Glenstone itself. And then, you arrive at the original 2006 building, Iconoclasts, with its selections from the Glenstone Collection. At the entrance is Richard Serra’s steel spiral, Sylvester (2001). Walking through its wide, soaring, curving walkways with the light constantly shifting is a fitting preview for what is to come.

Iconoclasts offers a breathtaking array of Abstract Expressionists, Cubists and Pop Art of the 20th Century. In these rooms are 100 years of groundbreaking art history. In one room are three Ruth Asawa sculptures, along with a large de Kooning, a Joan Mitchell and a Clyfford Still. To stand in this room and rotate your view is to take in an expansive view of Abstract Expressionism. Another room housed five endearing, inspired and historic folk art pictures by Bill Traylor with vivid color in his inimitable voice. A Cy Twombly gigantic blackboard painting. Lee Krasner’s enormous swirling The Eye is the First Circle (1960), measuring nearly 8 by 16 feet. The painting hangs alone, triumphant.

There is so much more. Some installations change; others are permanent. One day at Glenstone is not enough. There is so much beauty to absorb, all of it showcased and exciting. The Rales’ vision and exacting work are a rare gift to the world. Go!

Glenstone is located at 12100 Glen Road in Potomac, Maryland. The museum is open Thursday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is always free, but reservations are required. For more information: 301-983-5001, info@glenstone.org.

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A Museum Lover’s Guide to Maryland’s Glenstone

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