Glenstone’s Pavilions Reopen with a Provocative Lineup of Must-See Shows

What’s unmissable are the five exhibitions opening in tandem with the Pavilions’ return. “It’s rare that we would have a choreographed opening like this,” Nora Severson Cafritz, the museum’s senior director of collections, tells Galerie. “These are shows that would have opened the course of, say, 12 to 18 months.” But they’re arriving right on time, in provocative conversation with each other and, notably, with the Pavilions themselves. 

Visitors hear first from Simone Leigh, whose monumental Sentinel (Mami Wata) (2020–1) looks as if she took up residence in the vast atrium that forms Room 1 of the Pavilions. The mermaid/snake charmer figure peers overhead towards a glazed expanse announcing the central water court, whose pools are dotted and furred with water lilies, irises, and rushes—and a second Leigh sculpture, The Last Garment (2022), the first artwork to be installed in the water and a moving depiction of a woman washing clothes by hand. Apart from their relationship to the architecture and landscape design, the two figures are otherwise free of curatorial intervention. “There’s something really special in trying to give every artwork its own space in discipline and installation technique,” Severson Cafritz says. “We take that very seriously.”

It shows. Down the corridor, the only sign of a massive new show of work by Jenny Holzer is an ominous, noisy rumble. Deep inside Room 2, it turns out to be a makeshift paper shredder, a mouse hole at the bottom of a wall Holzer designed into which one of her signature LED text crawls glitches and vanishes. Elsewhere, her series of silkscreen paintings of redacted, declassified government documents have never looked more sadly audacious. “She’s a very decisive, very thoughtful, very brave artist, and she knows what she wants,” Severson Cafritz says. “Our job is to try to make that happen in as uncompromised a manner as we can.”

Next door, a different kind of riot is unfolding: past an entryway referencing the psychedelic landscapes on the cover of Prince and the Revolution’s 1985 album Around the World in a Day, artist Alex Da Corte built a scale model of Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. Only the private homes are replaced by fast-food restaurants and, deeper still, a Glenstone commission of a neon house on fire, with interior folding chairs pulled up to his brutal Red Pencil Devil (2018) series of vignettes starring pop culture icons in scenes of distress. 

This notion of a home imperiled is complicated by Room 9’s vibrant, impassioned suite of paintings by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, in which the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation artist redraws this country’s borders entirely. And by Room 8’s rotating series of sculptures by Charles Ray, whose subjects seem to be both right at home and lost in their own thoughts. 

The views inevitably return to the water court, whose pools make various meanings in collaboration with the artwork, sometimes calling to mind the so-called swamp of the capitol—or baptismal pools, or dying ecosystems, or even worksites. “Glenstone’s mission,” says Severson Cafritz, “is to celebrate the seamless integration of art, architecture, and nature.” To borrow a more frayed turn of phrase made not far from these bucolic installations, mission accomplished.