The National Gallery of Art has received a staggering endowment of $116 million to permanently fund its nationwide loan program, “Across the Nation.” The gift is courtesy of the Mitchell P. Rales Family Foundation on behalf of Mitchell Rales, a collector and the National Gallery’s former president and a board member for 20 years. The transformational donation is the largest gift to endow programming in the institution’s history, and was made to mark the 250th anniversary of America this year. The gift comes at a pivotal moment in time as regional museums across the nation struggle with slashes in funding and declining attendance.
“Across the Nation” was launched in the spring of 2025 as a way to facilitate broader access across the country to key pieces from the National Gallery’s collection of 160,000 works of art. The program invites small and mid-size partner museums to select works from its collection, which the National Gallery then supports by way of fully underwritten transport, installation, insurance, training, and regional marketing initiatives. “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,” said Rales in an interview with the New York Times. “And so I started to say, ‘What do we need to do to put the word ‘national’ into the National Gallery of Art?’”
Kaywin Feldman, the National Gallery of Art’s director added: “Through his remarkable partnership and thanks to this landmark gift, the National Gallery is able to establish ‘Across the Nation’ as a core pillar of our work and fulfill a central part of our vision—of the nation and for all the people. We will not only be able to introduce beloved works of art from our collection to new audiences for generations to come, but will also establish a dynamic model for collection-sharing and build a collaborative network with our museum colleagues nationwide.”
The pilot program, also supported by Rales, launched with 10 partner museums and reached nearly 900,000 visitors; the next cycle will launch in the fall of 2027 and run through 2029. The inaugural cycle placed paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Mark Rothko at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska; a selection of Impressionist works by Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cézanne at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington; and works by Sandro Botticelli, Hans Memling, and Andy Warhol at the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan.
With the program now funded into perpetuity, the National Gallery intends to loan works to museums in all 50 states over the next decade to ensure that millions of Americans who might not otherwise make it to Washington, D.C. will be able to experience the collection.
