Glenstone Museum’s Fall 2024 Exhibitions to Include Melvin Edwards, Cady Noland, and Lorraine O’Grady.

September 18, 2024
A large silver stockade sits on a grey floor in a white-walled room.

POTOMAC, MD, September 18, 2024 — Glenstone Museum is pleased to announce new presentations opening on October 17, 2024, featuring works by American artists Cady Noland (b. 1956), Melvin Edwards (b.1937), and Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934). This will be the first time each artist has exhibited at Glenstone. The exhibitions, which will remain on view through February 23, 2025, mark the first phase of reopening the renovated Pavilions building.

Spanning three rooms of the Pavilions, the presentation by Cady Noland was developed in collaboration with the artist and marks the first major survey by a U.S. museum of her decades-long career.

Noland’s first solo exhibition took place in 1988 at White Columns in New York. The following year, she presented a seminal exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. She later participated in the 1991 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, in 1992. Subsequent exhibitions include the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1995, and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1996. In 2018, Noland was the subject of a major survey at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany. The presentation at Glenstone will showcase iconic works spanning Noland’s career, from some of her earliest sculptures created in the late 1980s to recent pieces exhibited in 2023 at Gagosian Gallery’s 75th & Park location in New York. Most of the works on display are drawn from Glenstone’s collection.

On view in Room 9 of the Pavilions will be a selection of sculptures by Melvin Edwards from his ongoing Lynch Fragments series, a body of work begun in the 1960s in response to racial violence in the United States. Now numbering more than 200 unique works, the series features welded abstract forms incorporating nails, rakes, hammers, chains, and other elements of discarded steel that evoke the rural American south and Edwards’ upbringing in then-segregated Houston, Texas.

In Room 11, Glenstone will present Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), a series of “haiku-like” diptych-poems by Lorraine O’Grady. The work is a reprisal of the artist’s 1977 series of “found” newspaper poems, Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), which was influenced by O’Grady’s early career as a research economist and intelligence analyst. O’Grady—a notable polyglot—spent years examining newspapers, reports, and transcripts, causing language to “melt away.” She returned to the collages forty years later, cutting and collaging enlarged reproductions of the 250 original poems into twenty-six new paired panels. The result is “counter confessional” poetry that converts public language into the private poetry of an individual with collective import. This presentation marks the debut of Cutting Out CONYT installed in its entirety as a sequence of quadriptychs, representing a new stage in the conceptualization of the piece and furtherance of O’Grady’s theory of the Both/And, a refutation of Western dualism.

“The diptych, appearance to the contrary, is anti-dualistic. That’s why it’s been my weapon of choice to oppose the West’s ‘either/or’ binary, which is always exclusive and hierarchical,” explains O’Grady. “I feel that the ‘both/and’ lack of resolution, an acceptance and embrace of it, is what needs to become the cultural goal.”

Emily Wei Rales, director and co-founder of Glenstone, said, “One of our goals at Glenstone is to present work that redefines how we think about art, and in turn how art prompts us to think. That’s exactly what we see in the work of these three critically important artists. Though very different in their practices, each has worked with found or appropriated materials, using them in highly distinctive ways to transform ideas about history, society, and ourselves. In their own ways, these exhibitions inspire us to engage with urgent issues of our time.”

Admission to Glenstone is always free. Visit the website to schedule a visit and learn more about the guaranteed entry program.

About Glenstone

Glenstone, a museum of modern and contemporary art, is integrated into nearly 300 acres of gently rolling pasture and unspoiled woodland in Montgomery County, Maryland, less than 15 miles from the heart of Washington, DC. Established by the not-for-profit Glenstone Foundation, the museum opened in 2006 and provides a contemplative, intimate setting for experiencing iconic works of art and architecture within a natural environment. The museum includes its original building, the Gallery, as well as additional structures opened in its 2018 expansion designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners: the Arrival Hall (LEED platinum), the Pavilions, and the Café (both LEED gold).

Glenstone is open Thursdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.From May 3 – September 28, 2024, Glenstone will stay open until 8 p.m. each Friday and Saturday with special summer programming. Admission to Glenstone is always free and visits can be scheduled online at: www.glenstone.org.

Media Contacts

Natalie Miller, Polskin Arts: [email protected]