Out of the blue, an old friend reached out to invite me to visit Glenstone with him. I had never heard of Glenstone, but after taking a look at the website, it's an indoor/outdoor museum of modern art. It's in Potomac, MD, so not far from me, and it looked really cool. Plus, it sounds like tickets are hard to come by: they sell out really fast months in advance. So I thought this might be my only opportunity to go! And we hadn't seen each other in a few years, so I thought it would be nice to catch up.
After a casual breakfast at Tally Ho, we made our way to the museum. While the day started out a bit cloudy and rainy, when we arrived it was bright and sunny, so we were ready to explore!
Glenstone sits on nearly 300 acres of land, and it was beautiful walking through the meadows and forests. The trees and flowers are nature's art, no? We saw the outdoor sculptures first, although there weren't as many of them as I expected (especially with so much space!). The first one we saw was Jeff Koons' Split-Rocker. We could tell it was the head of a rocking horse, but it wasn't until we got up close that we could see that it's covered in something like green felt with holes in it.
Perhaps we were too early in the spring to see this piece at its best. Because when you look it up online, there are times when it's in full bloom with lots of color! Like this:
Then we saw Tony Smith's Smug, which made both of us think of spiders:
We eventually made our way through the forest where we encountered Robert Gober's Two Partially Buried Sinks:
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| Needless to say, we were underwhelmed by this one. The hummingbird we saw flitting through the woods was much more interesting! Image found here. |
While we were walking in the woods, we also saw two stone buildings that we didn't realize were pieces on exhibit, and there was a circle of stumps that counted as art, too. If I can't tell that it's art... it probably shouldn't be called art.
Charles Ray was very creative in naming this piece Horse and rider:
Before entering the buildings, there were two outdoor sculptures that were somewhat interesting. We could walk through Richard Serra's Sylvester (though both of us were hoping we'd come across something at its center), and Michael Heizer's Compression Line was pretty cool, slowing disappearing into the earth.
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| Richard Serra's Sylvester. Image found here. |
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| Michael Heizer's Compression Line. I took this picture looking down from a railing; the photo doesn't do a great job of showing the size of the piece, although there are the trees in the background for scale. |
The Gallery building was dedicated to works solely of Faith Ringgold, an African-American artist who has been making art for decades. I really liked her work, and I think showcasing her pieces is very timely for what our country is going through regarding race relations (well, we've been going through that for a very long time, as her art portrays). My favorite pieces from her were the ones with overt political messaging, particularly with her use of the American flag. I appreciate art that has something to say!
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| Ringgold was against all of the money being spent on space exploration when so many African-Americans are suffering here on Earth. She included the message that she felt the U.S. government was sending in this piece: Die N*gger (a little hard to read in the photo). Image found here. |
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| The Flag is Bleeding is one of two pieces in which she portrays the red of the flag bleeding the blood of Americans who have lost their lives seeking basic human rights. Image found here. |
Ringgold also collaborated with her mother in creating quilt paintings. I really liked the one she did of Maya Angelou and her poems, including Phenomenal Woman, which is my sorority's house poem.
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| Maya's Quilt of Life was actually commissioned by Oprah Winfrey. Image found here. |
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| Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? is an entire story quilt. I have never seen so many words on a piece of art! I didn't have time to read it all, but I thought it was interesting to mix multiple kinds of storytelling into one piece. Image found here. |
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This quilt featured a painting of Martin Luther King, Jr. with a quote from his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. Ringgold created similar pieces featuring Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
Image found here. |
Outside of the Gallery was a patio looking over a beautiful lake. There were two Canada geese swimming in the water and a heron standing on the bank. So idyllic!
Then we made our way to the Pavilions, which are the main museum buildings. It almost seems like some sort of post-apocalyptic compound, these stone squares rising up in the middle of nowhere:
From the Pavilions we saw additional pieces from the artists who had outdoor sculptures:
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| Gober put sinks in the woods, and then painted interior walls to look like woods with running sinks and piles of newspapers from 1992 (when the exhibit was originally created). I wondered if this piece was supposed to represent our wastefulness of resources, just letting the water run and killing trees for newspapers to the point that we have to paint trees on our walls to see them...? Image found here. |
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Heizer's Collapse was enclosed in these exterior walls. A crane had to lift the steel beams and place them into the 16-foot-deep hole. Visitors have to view the piece with a docent so no one falls into the hole. I wasn't sure if this looked like anything other than a broken-down, abandoned construction site...
Image found here. |
Here were some of my favorites:
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| My friend and I loved these hanging sculptures from Ruth Asawa. How was she able to interlock those different chains together to create shapes within shapes? Screen shot from here. |
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I thought this map by Alighiero Boetti was really cool, since he represented each country with the colors of its own flag. I couldn't identify some of the countries, and of course the spacing is off (when you flatten a globe, you can't see just how close Alaska is to Russia). But I will say that when I was looking up his other work, he has made A LOT of similar pieces. I can understand wanting to show new countries that are created or borders that have changed, but he must have made at least a dozen of these.
So now I'm less impressed... Image found here. |
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| This photo doesn't do justice to this piece by Ives Klein. I liked it because of its tactile nature. The sea sponges and pebbles painted blue brought interest to a canvas painted one color (more on that later...). Image found here. |
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These neon lights are hard to read in a photograph (see this drawing instead), but Bruce Nauman's American Violence demonstrates the sexual violence of our culture all wrapped up in a swastika. In person the words would go in and out, and you could image mixing up the phrases together (e.g. "Rub it on" could go both with "my chest" or "my face"). American culture is hyper-sexualized, and as we've seen recently, Nazi sentiments/sympathizers still exist, and if anything the numbers are growing.
Image found here. |
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I really liked this piece by Kazuo Shiraga. For me it was the fact that I wanted to touch it: the paint was so thick and the canvas was folded and scrunched in places in a way that made me want to run my fingers along the work and know what it feels like. Of course you can't do that in a museum!
Image found here. |
Some pieces we didn't get to see. Because of COVID restrictions, some rooms were closed, and only one party at a time could go into each of the smaller rooms. There was a group of teenagers who had zero respect for people's time, and they lingered in the rooms fully aware that there were people waiting to get in. For example, they sat in this room for who knows how many minutes:
So I just snuck in for a peak to see that one. There were other pieces that my friend and I had plenty of time to linger upon, but we didn't because they were the kind of pieces that give modern art a bad name. Here are some examples:
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These paintings by On Kawara represent the dates of the moon landing. But how is this art...?
Image found here |
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| This piece by Brice Marden is called Moss Sutra with the Seasons. I understand how the different colors can represent the four seasons, but painting a square a single color is the cliché of modern art. Image found here. |
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| These Jo Baer paintings only have color along their edges. WHY?! Image found here. |
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The museum's notes didn't say how old Jean-Michel Basquiat was when he painted Frogmen. I guessed 10; he was 23. Close enough. If this is fine art, then every child should be getting commissions.
Image found here. |
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| Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (i.e. a urinal). I will admit that I consider toilets art when I watch The Great Pottery Throw Down on HBO Max, but that's because they have painted them so beautifully or have created them in an interesting shape. This guy laid a urinal horizontally and painted someone else's name on it. I just...can't. Image found here. |
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| Agnes Martin used graphite (i.e. a pencil) to draw who knows how many lines in her piece Pilgrimage. I told my friend that anyone with a ruler and a lot of patience could recreate this. Image found here. |
The outdoor experience was definitely my favorite part. The Pavilions surround a water feature where we saw irises, tiny fish, and even a tadpole!
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| When we went the lily pads weren't in bloom yet. I wondered which plants were purposefully planted there and which ones were growing naturally. Image found here. |
All in all, I really enjoyed my visit to Glenstone. Modern art isn't really my thing, but I appreciated the grounds especially, and some of the pieces were actually really cool. I would love to go back, but with the ticket situation, I'm not sure when that will be. I would be just as happy to just walk around the outside! I was telling my friend that Glenstone should take advantage of the beautiful land and provide private bird walks early in the morning before the museum opens. We saw two hawks along with the other birds I mentioned earlier. I'll take the beauty of nature over human-created art any day!
