At a time when regional museums continue to struggle with post-pandemic financial pressures and declining attendance, the National Gallery of Art in Washington on Tuesday announced that the billionaire collector Mitchell P. Rales is donating $116 million to send loans from the collection to smaller institutions around the country.
“We are the nation’s museum,” said Rales, 69, who has been a National Gallery trustee for more than 20 years and served for five years as president.
“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,” he added. “And so I started to say, ‘What do we need to do to put the word ‘national’ into the National Gallery of Art?’”
He continued, “The defunding that’s going on for the arts as a whole — somebody’s got to pick up the slack.”
The gift, the largest to endow programming in the National Gallery’s history, will fund the loan program “Across the Nation,” commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, and allow small and medium-size museums to select works from the Gallery’s permanent collection for two-year loans.
The program will be funded in perpetuity, covering the shipping, installation, insurance and marketing costs that are often prohibitive for regional museums. The Gallery will also help its partners develop programming around the borrowed works.
“We recognize that a lot of Americans don’t come to Washington,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery, adding that she wanted smaller museums “to have more ownership and to really feel like a work of art in some fashion is theirs.”
The National Gallery — one of the most visited art museums in the country with nearly four million visitors in 2024 — has major works by Monet, Degas, O’Keeffe, Rembrandt, Rothko and da Vinci in its collection, as well as Hudson River School paintings through its 2014 absorption — together with George Washington University — of the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Established by Congress in 1937, the National Gallery operates through a public-private partnership, with the federal government providing 80 percent of its $235 million operating budget.
Tying the loan program to America’s 250th anniversary could seem like an effort to appease the Trump administration, whose 2025 executive order led the Gallery to end the diversity programs that had defined its extensive rebranding just four years before. The rebranding — “Of the nation and for all the people” — included an effort to get more women and people of color onto the museum’s walls and staff.
But Feldman, who became the Gallery’s first female director in 2018 and has a reputation for progressive change, suggested she had not backed down on certain core principles. “We recognize that to be excellent today, we must be representative of all of America,” she said. “We are maintaining that commitment.”
Rales also called diversity “good for business,” adding, “If we want to attract an African American, Asian or Indian population to the Gallery, you have to be able to show that work.”
Rales, who grew up in Washington and founded the Danaher Corporation — a science and technology firm — with his brother Steven in 1984, has a net worth of about $10 billion. He started collecting in the early 1990s and has over the years become one of the leading collectors in the country.
In 2006 he and his former wife, Emily Rales, opened Glenstone, a museum and foundation in Potomac, Md., which they expanded in 2018 and where Emily still serves as director.
The National Gallery contribution comes from the Mitchell P. Rales Family Foundation, which supports the arts, education and the sciences.
“It’s Mitch’s love letter to America through art,” said Darren Walker, president of the Gallery’s board of directors. “All of this means more art for America that is financed significantly by private philanthropy.”
The loan program is the latest in a series of efforts by museums to share their collections with institutions that have smaller budgets and lower profiles but are crucial to their local communities.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, a Smithsonian Institution that focuses on modern and contemporary art, earlier this year announced that it would loan artworks to smaller museums in all 50 states.
That program is a partnership with the Art Bridges Foundation — created in 2017 by the Walmart heir Alice Walton, the founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
A pilot of the National Gallery’s program, also funded by Rales, has reached nearly 900,000 visitors across 10 partner museums. Among those included were the Boise Art Museum in Idaho, the Figge Art Museum in Iowa and the Mint Museum in North Carolina.
The next cycle will start in fall 2027 and run until 2029, with partner institutions to be announced.
In the pilot, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno — which has a budget of $9.2 million — borrowed 80 Dorothea Lange photographs for a recent show about resilience in portraiture. “They allowed us to tell a richer, more interwoven American story about a period of time,” said David B. Walker, chief executive of the museum.
The loans also enabled the Figge to mount a more ambitious exhibition of Northern Renaissance and Baroque artists. “We have works from this era, and they are of a high quality, but we don’t have enough to do a long-term permanent installation of them,” said Melissa Mohr, the executive director and chief executive of the museum, which has a modest operating budget of $3.5 million. “So by pairing them with these incredible works from the National Gallery, we’ve been able to create an experience for our visitors that they would otherwise have to travel to bigger cities to see.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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