Staff Field Trip to Glenstone: An Essay by Gallery Assistant India Mawn
Bright and early on a dreary Thursday morning in February, my friends and I gathered in front of The Anderson, along with a cohort of other gallery assistants, preparators, and interns. Sleepily eager to go somewhere new, everyone loaded into the van. As an educational treat, the gallery support staff from both The Anderson and the ICA were taking a trip to Glenstone, the post-World War II museum in Maryland.
I’m lucky enough to have spent the past four semesters as a gallery assistant at The Anderson. I am also currently taking Applied Curatorial Practices, a class offered at The Anderson. Through both of these roles, I’ve gotten to experience what goes into installing an exhibition: all of the measurements, ladders, scaffolding, awkwardly (but safely) carrying work up flights of stairs, making holes and patching them, arduously deciding where each piece goes, and more. As a result, a deep appreciation for the inner workings of display has been instilled in me. I still have an affinity for the artwork itself, but sometimes the effort put into ensuring others see the work is awe-inducing on its own.
This type of awe was a core part of my experience of Glenstone, where site-specific works coexist with the land, and indoor galleries have transformative qualities. Glenstone sits on more than 230 acres of land, with works existing anywhere from the two gallery buildings, to the tops of hills, and (what felt like) deep inside the woods. The mission of the museum is to integrate art, architecture, and the landscape into one, contemplative space.
After trekking from the parking lot to the main gallery building, we got the chance to meet with Nora Cafritz, Glenstone’s Director of Collections. She talked to us about the installation of Compression Line, Michael Heizer’s monumental sculpture installed in the ground. Cafritz, who has been part of Glenstone since its beginning, recalled the installation for this piece, explaining that the first contractors had quit, saying it was never going to work. To create this sculpture, machinery removed large amounts of soil, replacing it with steel. The same amount of soil was put back into the landscape and pushed into the steel until it bowed in the middle.
Heizer’s vision for Compression Line prevailed, as it did with another one of his complex works that imposes itself on the landscape at Glenstone. After waiting in line for some time, my friends and I were carefully led into an outdoor space completely walled off from the rest of the world. There, we met Collapse, a huge rectangular hole in the ground, with fifteen large steel beams that appeared as if they had been casually dropped in the hole, crossing over one another and poking out on all sides. Aside from feeling impressed by this lofty installation, this piece in particular filled me with an almost eerie feeling, like I’d been removed from the world and placed in a new, apocalyptic one. The steel looked as if it had been abandoned for eternity, untouched by anything but the weather and bacteria that left them speckled with algae. This space transported us to a dystopian world. The gallery associates only contributed to that feeling, as they wore matching slate-gray uniforms, all the way down to their monochrome New Balances.
There is hardly any information on the walls at Glenstone. Visitors are encouraged to have a personal, contemplative experience, or engage with the gallery associates. These silver-clad gallery guides are no regular museum docents. Most of them are part of Glenstone’s Emerging Professionals Program, an entry-level incubator for a career in museums. This program is one to two years long and consists of becoming a repository of knowledge for the visitors, and also getting to learn the ins and outs of museum work.
Despite being a social gallery assistant myself, I avoided talking to my Glenstone counterparts at first, intimidated by their omnipresence throughout the sparse gallery—something about those gray outfits really freaked me out a little bit. When I came across Roni Horn’s Water Doubles, I forgot my fear and looked at a woman in gray in disbelief. I knew what I was looking at was not a huge barrel filled to the brim with water but something more impressive—I needed an explanation. She assured me that what I was looking at was solid glass. One in matte black and the other clear glass, these two sculptures required years of research and attempts before they fully came to fruition.
This is a quality that the work at Glenstone, and Glenstone itself, all hold. Nothing feels impulsive or spontaneous. Everything is marked with years of contemplation and research. The museum is a thoughtful composite of science, art—maybe even spirituality or science fiction. To those who work in galleries and those who don’t, there is something to be wowed by.
