Maryland’s Glenstone Museum has announced they will acquire more than 100 photographs from the collection of Andrew and Mary Pilara and the Pilara Foundation in San Francisco. The Pilara collection is among the greatest in North America, and will bolster the museum’s already significant collection of conceptual photographs with luminaries of documentary photography like Walker Evans and Diane Arbus. The acquisition, which was made in part with guidance from Gagosian Art Advisory and Jeffrey Fraenkel of Fraenkel Gallery, comes just over a month after the Pilara’s announced that Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, where the collection was kept, will shut its doors in 2025 after over a decade.
The decision to shutter Pier 24 was not an easy one. However, San Francisco Port Commission’s decision to triple the rent for Pier 24’s home under the San Francisco Bay Bridge led the Pilara Foundation to rethink how best to serve both their local community and the global photographic community and change its mission from an “operating foundation to a granting foundation.” Apart from sharing philosophical values with Pier 24, free admission, education, and community engagement, for example, the Glenstone similarly views photography as a driving force in contemporary art. “The advent of photography is arguably the single most important technological innovation to have an impact on art since the late 19th century, so it’s impossible to tell the full story of modern art without it,” Glenstone director and co-founder Emily Rales told ARTnews.