Stretch your legs — and mind
Art, architecture and nature spread over 300 acres of rolling farmland at Glenstone in Montgomery County
Sometimes a good walk will do more than just expand your lungs and stretch your legs – it can do the same for your brain aswell. That’s what we discovered when our daughter, Anna Holland, and her new husband, Eric Cavell, invitedmy wife, Louise and me to visit a private modern art museum called Glenstone in Montgomery County.
I’d never heard of the place before. Itwas founded in 2006 by Mitch Rales, a Washington, DCbillionaire and his wife, Emily Wei, who serves as the museum’s director and curator. Spread out over 300 acres of rolling farmland, Glenstone has engrained walking into their visitors’ experience of art, architecture and nature.
Located in Potomac, it’s about an hour’s drive from Annapolis, but once you get there, aswe did one recent Saturday afternoon, you can walk for miles, see some amazing outdoor sculpture, and not even set one foot inside either of the two large museum buildings.
And “large” is the word to describe this place. The vision of the founders was large
to begin with. They called it “Glenstone” after its location on Glen Road, and after the carderock stone that’s quarried nearby and featured in dry-stacked walls in buildings throughout the museum campus.
“We envision Glenstone not only as a place, but a state of mind created by the
energy of architecture, the power of art, and the restorative qualities of nature,” the couple states on their web site. “At the core of the museum is a collection of post-World War II art, a very personal project driven by the pursuit of iconic works that have changed the way we think about the art of our time.”
The four of us checked in at the new visitors’ center at our allotted time. Admission is free, but it’s limited to a small number of people on any given day, so you need to make reservations well in advance. From the entrance, you can see a grouping of white granite cubes nestled into a distant hillside. Wewere in Santa Fe, NewMexico, this time last fall, and the setting reminded me of an adobe village youmight find there. This grouping turns out to be the “Pavilions,” a group of 11huge gallery rooms surrounding a quarter-acrewater court, connected by glass-paned corridors. It opened to the public in 2018.
The11 rooms comprise 50,000 square feet of exhibit space. The original gallery, which opened in 2006, houses another 9,000 square feet of exhibits in a sleek modern structure set on a hilltop on the far side of a reflection pond.
But before we could get anywhere near these structures, wewere lured up a path through a meadow by the sight of what appeared to be a brontosaurus peering over the crest of the hill. Whenwe got nearer, we discovered a colossal topiary sculpture in the shape of an animal’s head, though instead of boxwood, the plant material upon closer inspection turned out to be thousands of individual potted flowering plants of different varieties.
We spent some considerable time discussing what kind of head itwas, perhaps
that of a giraffe, perhaps a hobby horse. Interpretation at this museumis intentionally sparse, as the curators don’t want your impression of the art to be influenced by their views. There are “no digital apps, audio guides or touch screens here,” the somewhat terse brochure cautions.
Eric, a graphic artist by trade and, unlike me, someone who actually appreciates modern art, informed methat this sculpture, called “Split-Rocker,” was created in the year 2000 by Jeff Koons, an American artist best knownfor his gigantic stainless-steel balloon animals. I didn’t find out until I lookedKoons up later that his “Rabbit” sculpture sold last year for $91.1 million, theworld’s most expensivework of art ever sold at auction by a living artist.
We followed the path to the bottom of the hill only to be confronted by an immense onyx tarantula-like structure that squatted on an expanse of gravel set against a backdrop of pine trees. This is “Smug,” the 1973 work of the lateTony Smith, a pioneer in American Minimalist sculpture, though there is nothing minimal about this gargantuan piece. Itwas all I could do to comply with the edict on the sign to stay an arm’s length away. I reallywanted to climb through it like the monkey bars at a playground, and Imight have, too, if it hadn’t been for the security cameras
We spotted a large spiral of steel encased in a patina of rust sitting upright on the patio behind
the main gallery, like the end of an unfurled scroll. The opening invited us towander in andwe tiptoed through the spiral, feeling dizzy by the timewe got to the open space in the center. This sculpture, called “Sylvester,” was created in 2001by the American sculptor Richard Serra, whomthe Museum ofModern Art describes as “.one of the preeminent sculptors of our era.”
Fromthere, we followed the WoodlandTrail into the forest of sycamores, oaks and poplars. Suddenly thewoods echoed with the cacophony of a full-blown battle: bombs blasting, planes strafing, machine guns rattling – so of course, we had to followthe
sound and find out what the heck was going on.
It turned out to be an audio installation called “FOREST(for a thousand years…),” created in 2012 by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. It consisted of multiple high-fidelity speakers placed strategically around a knoll in the forest, behind trees, high up in the limbs, making the sound seem like itwas coming fromeverywhere and nowhere. Upright logs provided seating for the dozen or so
visitors engrossed by the conflict. Aswe approached, the battle quelled, only to be replaced by an angelic choir singing a baroque requiem a capella. The effectwas enchanting.
The trail took us through a wooded valley with more delightful surprises than I have the space to describe, then up a switchback boardwalk to the Pavilions. Itwas getting late, sowe had to rush through the indoor exhibits before the five o’clock closing, but whatwe sawof the artists that even I recognized – Calder, Pollock, Rothko, Warhol – and the nearly 50 others, some ofwhom were new even tomy art-savvy son-in-law– made us regretwe had such a late start for our visit.
The four of us ended our experience in one of the smaller exhibit rooms, where the solework of artwas a view through the wall-to-wall plate-glass window. We sat on a hand-carvedwooden pew aswe gazed in awe as the light of the setting early-winter sun spread across a hillside pasture and silhouetted the deer grazing at its crest.
We all agreed thatwe should come back again in the spring. In the few hourswe had been there, we had logged 2.2 miles at an estimated rate of 27.3 artists per hour.
If you check out the Glenstone website, you’ll find the guidelines for planning your visit. As I mentioned, admission is free, but it’s operating at a limited capacity on visitor days, Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets are available in 3-month increments. As a month passes, a new month is added at 10 a.m. on the first of the month. They go fast, so make your plans now.