The National Gallery of Art Embraces New Role as Lending Library, Thanks to a Big Gift That Sends Artwork to Other Museums

A $116 million donation from the family foundation of longtime trustee Mitchell P. Rales will help share the museum’s collection in honor of the 250th birthday of the U.S.

Mary Randolph | Correspondent

April 22, 2026

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A new major gift to the National Gallery of Art will help the Washington, D.C. institution lend works from its collection to museums from Alaska to Kansas to Florida.

The Mitchell P. Rales Family Foundation gave $116 million to the museum’s Across the Nation program, which celebrates the 250th birthday of the United States by sending art to and supporting exhibitions at smaller regional museums across the country. Mitchell P. Rales is a trustee of the National Gallery of Art. This gift marks the largest programming-related donation in the museum’s history.

“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,” Rales tells the New York Times’ Robin Pogrebin. “And so I started to say, ‘What do we need to do to put the word “national” into the National Gallery of Art?’”

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The Across the Nation program kicked off in 2025 with initial funding from Rales that paid for shipping, installation and other costs associated with sending artworks to ten museums through two-year loans. Almost 900,000 museum visitors to those partner institutions have benefited so far.

“We recognize that a lot of Americans don’t come to Washington,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, tells the Times. She adds that she wants smaller museums “to have more ownership and to really feel like a work of art in some fashion is theirs.”

The next round of loans will go out in the fall of 2027.

Rales co-founded Danaher Corporation, a science and technology firm, in 1984, and he has collected art since the 1990s. Some of those works are on display at Glenstone, the art museum in Maryland that he founded with Emily Wei Rales, who serves as its director. The museum, which turns 20 this year, is free to the public and features around 1,300 artworks set on a 300-acre campus.

“Our hallmark experience is known for being uncrowded, contemplative and unhurried,” Valentina Nahon, senior director of public engagement at Glenstone, tells the Baltimore Banner.

That’s a contrast to the busy downtown setting of the National Gallery of Art, where Rales spent five years as president and has been a board member for more than 20 years.

Now U.S. museums in remote areas and urban centers alike will have the chance to show off a piece or several from a collection that ordinarily sticks closer to home in the nation’s capital. Feldman tells the Washington Post’s Ethan Beck that the donation from the Mitchell P. Rales Family Foundation is not only for the National Gallery of Art, but for the entire U.S.

“It relates back to this idea of the National Gallery serving the nation more fully,” Feldman says. “It’s a patriotic gift. Mitch is a very patriotic person. It’s very important to him to give back to our country.”

Museums that have already received loans include the Mint Museum in North Carolina and the Figge Art Museum in Iowa. The Anchorage Museum, for example, borrowed paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Nancy Graves and Mark Rothko.

“These loans bridge geographies, inviting us to see Alaska in context with major American art movements and narratives,” said the Anchorage Museum’s director, Julie Decker, in a statement. “It’s an unprecedented opportunity for our community—and for visitors from across the globe—to see artwork by these renowned artists in Alaska. We believe this collaboration will prompt fresh conversations about the connections between landscapes and expression.”

Big donations have been key to the National Gallery of Art since its founding. It was established as a gift to the people of the U.S. from Andrew W. Mellon, a banker, philanthropist and long-serving secretary of the Treasury. Congress accepted the offer in 1937. Today, the museum relies primarily on funding from the federal government.

This gift, Rales tells the Times, is intended to create more sustainability for the country’s artistic landscape. “The defunding that’s going on for the arts as a whole—somebody’s got to pick up the slack,” he says.

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Mary Randolph is a former editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.