Americans who never make it to Washington, DC, may be able to get a closer look at some of the National Gallery of Art's treasures. Billionaire collector and longtime Gallery trustee Mitchell Rales is giving $116 million to permanently fund a nationwide loan program that will send works from the museum's deep storage to small and mid-size museums across the country. The initiative, called "Across the Nation," will coincide with the United States' 250th birthday and is the largest program endowment in the Gallery's history, reports the New York Times.
The money will cover shipping, installation, insurance, and marketing—costs that often keep regional museums from borrowing major art. The Gallery has a 160,000-work collection, and most of that art wallows in storage "because you just can't show it all," Rales said. "And so I started to say, 'What do we need to do to put the word "national" into the National Gallery of Art?'"
As Rales, who the Washington Post reports co-founded the healthcare-focused Danaher Corporation in 1984 and is worth an estimated $4 billion, put it, "The defunding that's going on for the arts as a whole—somebody's got to pick up the slack." A Rales-funded pilot has already brought works like a Rothko to Boise, a Degas to Charlotte, and Dorothea Lange photographs to Reno, impacting nearly 900,000 visitors at 10 museums. The next full cycle of loans will run from 2027 to 2029.
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