[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2231277790.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., launched Across the Nation last spring, it wasn\u2019t clear how long the initiative to lend artworks from its collection to regional American museums would last. At the time, the NGA\u2014with financial support from billionaire art collector and museum trustee Mitchell Rales\u2014committed 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tNow, Rales has stepped up with an additional $116 million donation to endow 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe gift is timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the founding of America. \u201cI have long admired the National Gallery\u2019s commitment to national service and sharing artistic excellence with all people,\u201d Rales said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\n\tRales has been a trustee of the National Gallery since 2006 and served as president of the board from 2019 to 2024. \u00a0\u201cWe 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\u2019t show it all,\u201d Rales told the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cAnd so I started to say, \u2018What do we need to do to put the word \u201cnational\u201d into the National Gallery of Art?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe first cycle of Across the Nation\u2019s two-year loans\u2014which brought, for example, paintings by Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Mark Rothko, and Nancy Graves to the Anchorage Museum of Art and a portrait by Rembrandt to the Denver Art Museum\u2014will wrap up in 2027; the next cycle will run from 2027 to \u201929, with new partner museums to be announced.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/billionaire-mitchell-rales-national-gallery-art-lending-program-1234782323\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2231277790.jpg?w=1024″] When the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., launched Across the Nation last spring, it wasn\u2019t clear how long the initiative to lend artworks from its collection to regional American museums would last. At the time, the NGA\u2014with financial support from billionaire art collector and museum trustee Mitchell Rales\u2014committed to lend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1897272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1897272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1897272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1897272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1897272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}