Read the full article by Billionaire Mitchell P. Rales has given $116 million to the National Gallery of Art to be spent on loaning its works to museums around the country. The historic gift is the largest programming endowment ever made to the Washington, DC, institution, and will cover costs of its “Across the Nation” initiative. Established to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, the program will allow small and midsize US institutions to borrow works from the National Gallery’s permanent collection for two-year stints at no cost to them.
Rales, a cofounder of the Danaher Corporation, a Washington DC-based science and tech firm, is a noted collector and a founder of Potomac, Maryland’s Glenstone museum. He is a longtime trustee of the National Gallery and served as board president for five years. “We are the nation’s museum,” Rales told the New York Times. “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 continued. “And so I started to say, ‘What do we need to do to put the word “national” into the National Gallery of Art?’
A pilot of the program, also funded by Rales, has reached an audience of 900,000 at ten partner institutions across the country since its spring 2025 launch. The new cycle will kick off in 2027 and run through 2029.
The gift arrives as arts institutions remain under tremendous financial pressure, thanks to lower post-pandemic visitor numbers, changing donor habits, and vigorous cuts to funding made by the Trump administration.
“The defunding that’s going on for the arts as a whole,” Rales told the Times, “somebody’s got to pick up the slack.”
