Thursday, June 4, 2026
This month is peak bloom for “Split-Rocker,” a 37-foot-tall rocking-horse head, embedded with over 24,000 flowers, atop a grassy hill in Potomac, Maryland. (Why “split”? Because the head’s left half is a pony and its right half is a dinosaur.) Created in 2000 by Jeff Koons, the “living sculpture” is one of a dozen outdoor installations at Glenstone, founded by Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales, the museum’s director.
Opened to the public in 2006, the pristine campus is marking its 20th anniversary. Glenstone’s collection and exhibitions focus on post-World War II movements — Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism and Land Art — with contemporary artists increasingly part of the mix.
With his stainless-steel rabbits and balloon animals, his gilded porcelain statue of Michael Jackson with Bubbles the chimp, Koons, 71, has been dubbed the King of Neo-Pop. The seasonally blooming “Split-Rocker” was a clever way to bring his quirky elevation of popular culture to Glenstone, a serious, environmentally minded place.
Glenstone goes well beyond the idea of an art museum on an estate or in a park; it is a remarkably successful convergence of art and landscape, which is disturbed as little as possible. The website notes: “Glenstone has planted well over 13,000 trees on its 300-acre campus, restored miles of streambeds and cultivated dozens of acres of organically maintained native meadows.” Deer abound.
“Split-Rocker” by Jeff Koons at Glenstone. Photo by Richard Selden.
Map in hand, visitors follow winding paths and boardwalks to other works by prominent artists. Across from “Split-Rocker,” looking like a giant robot crab, is Tony Smith’s “Smug” of 1973, an open tent of black, faceted forms. Originally fabricated in plywood, “Smug” was recreated in painted aluminum in 2005, 25 years after the death of Smith, father of sculptor Kiki Smith. A similar piece, “Smoke,” installed at the Corcoran in 1967, made the cover of Time magazine (the permanent version is at LACMA).
Along Glenstone’s Woodland Trail are 69-year-old British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s “Clay Houses (Boulder-Room-Holes)” of 2007: three little houses of locally quarried mica-schist and clay dug up on the property. Goldsworthy’s best-known piece in the District is “Roof,” the nine flat domes of Buckingham Virginia slate, with oculi, installed in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building over the winter of 2004-05. Visitors can enter the “Clay Houses” to view their meditative minimalist interiors from 12:30 to 1:30 and from 2 to 3 p.m.
Following a boardwalk through the woods, one comes upon “Satellite,” a 24-foot-tall bronze created by Simone Leigh for the 2022 Venice Biennale. During her 2023-24 exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, it stood at the entrance; now it rises beside a pond. Born to Jamaican immigrant parents in Chicago in 1967, Leigh explores the experience of Black women in her work, often referencing African figurative sculpture.
Glenstone’s first site-specific commission was Richard Serra’s “Contour 290” of 2004, a curved wall of oxidized steel, 15 and a half feet high, that extends for nearly 75 yards. Steel got into Serra’s blood: his father was employed by a shipyard near San Francisco and the future sculptor worked in steel mills before getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale. A Guggenheim Fellowship in Japan in 1970 gave his industrial aesthetic a Zen-like simplicity.
“Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure” by Richard Serra in its specially constructed building. Photo by Richard Selden
Two other works by Serra, who died in 2024, are on the grounds: “Sylvester,” a steel spiral from 2001 (enter if you dare) outside the Gallery building and “Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure” of 2017, a mismatched quartet of 82-ton cylinders in a somewhat isolated cement-walled space, closed up after the piece was craned in.
Currently on view in the 9,000-square-foot Gallery, designed by Charles Gwathmey, is “Ties of our common kindred,” a special exhibition of American works from the collection. The title comes from the Declaration of Independence: “We have appealed to their [our British brethren’s] native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.”
“Ties” is a survey that few museums of American art could match. A sampling of the works on view: five paintings by Jackson Pollock and a first-rate one, “The Eye is the First Circle” of 1960, by Lee Krasner; four, all different, by Cy Twombly (and a sculpture); four by Kerry James Marshall. Also: three mobiles by Alexander Calder, three wire sculptures by Ruth Asawa and Claes Oldenburg’s soft “Cash Register” of 1961. The selection of photographs includes classic images by William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Cindy Sherman and others.
There are two major pieces by Robert Rauschenberg: his two-part silkscreen “Bicycle” of 1963 and “Gold Standard” of the following year, a gold folding screen, painted and collaged upon, to which objects including a shoe, a Coke bottle and a ceramic dog are attached (the dog by a leash).
Last year was the centennial of this master of unexpected visual juxtapositions, who was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on Oct. 22, 1925, and died in 2008. Rauschenberg100 shows recently ended at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. However, with the debut of the National Air and Space Museum’s renovated Flight and the Arts Center, an exhibition of 20 prints and sculptures, “The Ascent of Rauschenberg: Reinventing the Art of Flight,” will open on July 1.
Installation view of Michael Heizer’s “Collapse.” Courtesy Glenstone.
In 2018, a new Glenstone building, the Pavilions, designed by Thomas Phifer, added 50,000 square feet of exhibition space. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a lily-filled Water Court. Within are galleries for rotating shows and rooms containing long-term single-artist installations, prepared in consultation with the artists.
Two of the featured artists, Cy Twombly, who died in 2011, and Jasper Johns, still alive at 96, were romantic partners of Rauschenberg in the 1950s. In the room devoted to Johns are three works: “Flag on an Orange Field II” of 1958, “Within” of 1983/2005 in his “flagstone” style and, likewise gray, “Numbers” of 2007, depicting stacked horizontal rows of zero through nine, bringing to mind a set of metallic type.
Those who only know Twombly’s “blackboard” paintings will be intrigued by his white-painted sculptures (“White paint is my marble”), rough assemblages of miscellaneous items from his hometown of Lexington, Virginia, and his adopted town of Gaeta, Italy.
Also on view are works by Leigh, sculptor Robert Gober — whose “Two Partially Buried Sinks” of 1986-87 are elsewhere, looking like twin tombstones — the late painter Brice Marden and others. Seek out Alex Da Corte’s “Rubber Pencil Devil (Hell House)” of 2022, a neon-framed storybook house with nutty videos looping inside.
A glass door in the Pavilions leads to Michael Heizer’s “Collapse” of 1967, recreated in 2016. In a walled courtyard, 15 huge steel beams have apparently fallen into a smooth-sided rectangular hole, 16 feet deep. For safety reasons, only three visitors may go out to walk around it at a time, accompanied by a guide.
Just outside the Pavilions, visitors can look down upon another Heizer piece recreated in 2016, “Compression Line” of 1968, a rectangle of steel buried in soil in such a way that it bowed, leaving two arrowhead-shaped voids facing one another in a reddish gravel surface.
Now 81, Heizer has used earth-moving equipment to create art since the late 1960s. Begun in the early 1970s and deemed complete after 50 years is “City,” about 160 miles north of Las Vegas, said to be the world’s largest work of art.
Glenstone’s summer hours are Thursday, Friday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 to 8 p.m. Visitors must be 12 or older. Admission is free but ticketed.
At 10 a.m. on July 1, tickets will be released for July and August. Same-day tickets are available for educators, active-duty military, veterans, museum professionals, students 12 and older and persons arriving on the Route 301 Ride On bus, plus one guest each.
Glenstone
12100 Glen Road, Potomac, Maryland
glenstone.org