Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection

MARCH 24, 2023 – AUGUST 6, 2023

3^rd Floor, North Building, Loft Gallery 

Click here to check out the photos from opening night! 

The Speed Art Museum presents Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection, a major exhibition celebrating the extensive and significant collection of contemporary artworks assembled by the late Alfred R. Shands III (1928-2021) and Mary Norton Shands (1930-2009). This presentation also commemorates the transformative gift of art made to the Speed Art Museum, numbering over 100 artworks. 

It was Al Shands’s wish that the contemporary art collection he and his late wife, Mary, amassed at their Great Meadows estate in Crestwood, Kentucky be displayed together in a public exhibition before being dispersed to museums across the state. In this way, he sought not only a closure to the collection’s life at Great Meadows, but also a bridge to the works’ future lives in other contexts. Shands, a former Episcopalian priest, hoped to mount an exhibition that would be dynamic but also contemplative—a place where museum visitors could be inspired and explore what meaning the works could spark in their own lives.

This exhibition fulfills Shands’s desire to allow a greater audience to engage with works of art that gave him such pleasure over the years and to allow them the same opportunities to connect with the art—and each other—before the works become part of different collections and different stories. Rounding the Circle is curated by Julien Robson, director of the Great Meadows Foundation as well as a close friend and private curator to Al Shands. Having worked with Shands for more than twenty years, Robson is intimately familiar with Shands’s unique interest in the relationship between the works in the collection, as well as their connections to the surrounding architecture at Great Meadows. This knowledge will deeply inform the exhibition, creating a display of the artworks in an inspiring new context while also honoring Shands’s keen aesthetic sensibility. 

Artists in the exhibition include such renowned figures as Anish Kapoor, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Siah Armajani, Petah Coyne, Olafur Eliasson, Elizabeth Murray, Afredo Jaar, Betty Woodman, Sol LeWitt, and Tony Cragg, alongside leading Kentucky artists such as Vian Sora, Cynthia Norton, Kiah Celeste, and Sandra Charles.

The Speed Art Museum has been committed to collecting and exhibiting significant artworks from all times since the museum’s founding in 1927. Its rich collections today are largely the result of the generosity and vision of private citizens who have chosen to become great benefactors, and the Shands gift is the latest chapter in this long legacy of support. 

The Speed is a collection of collections, each compelling on its own terms yet capable of telling richer, more extraordinary stories when brought into dialogue. In this sense, the museum has been made far greater by Al & Mary Shands’s legacy and gift, an extraordinary benefaction to the city and the commonwealth. As the Speed Art Museum approaches its centennial, this collection of works will serve as a new and enduring pillar for the institution—generating reflection, dialogue, and inspiration for museum audiences for generations to come.

About Al and Mary Shands 

Collecting for Al and Mary Shands began in earnest in the early 1980s when Mary was asked to head the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation (now KMAC Museum). Starting with ceramics by local artists, the couple progressed to collecting artists with national reputations and eventually developed a focus on sculpture. By the middle of the decade, the collection—and the scale of the works they were acquiring—began to outgrow their home, leading the couple to build their home at Great Meadows in 1986. The house was designed not simply as a vessel for art, but to allow an integrative relationship to develop between the architecture, the art collection that was to grow within and around it, and the pastoral setting in Crestwood, Kentucky that they had chosen.

About the Great Meadows Foundation

Established by Al Shands in 2016, the Great Meadows Foundation engages the visual arts in Kentucky through grant programs that directly support the region’s artists and visual arts professionals. Its mission is to critically strengthen and support visual art in Kentucky by empowering our community’s artists and other visual arts professionals to research, connect, and participate more actively in the broader contemporary art world. To date, the foundation has awarded more than $750,000 to more than 250 artists in the region—including many whose works became part of Shands’s collection and are included in this exhibition.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Sunday, July 9, The Speed Round – Artist Presentations, 2 pm – 3:30 pm

Join Kentucky artists who’ve received Great Meadows Foundation grants, as they present a “pecha kucha” style energetic slide presentation. Each artist gets a creative 5 minutes to tell their story as an artist. Watch their stories and meet them after the presentations.

Friday, July 21, After Hours at the Speed, 5 pm – 10 pm

5 – 8 PM | Art-Making: Mini Sculptures inspired by Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection exhibition

7 PM | “Artist on Art” Gallery Talk in Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection exhibition

Sunday, July 23, Louisville: 30 Years of Change screening, 12:30 pm, FREE

Reverend Al Shands, in addition to being an avid and generous art collector, had a successful career as a documentary filmmaker. Louisville: 30 Years of Change is a documentary portrait of Louisville covering the 1940s through the 1960s–the decades that brought change through a powerful mix of war, race, and popular culture. Archival photographs and vintage film clips reveal a lost world that continues to shape and inspire our time. This 2002 KET production is based on restored documentaries shot in the 1970s by Shands.

Saturday, August 5, Adult workshop: Studio Sessions with Vian Sora, 10:30 am – 12:30 pm

Join us for this very special opportunity to spend time in our Classroom Studio with Rounding the Circle artist Vian Sora! Workshop participants will engage in conversation and get creative alongside Sora, using experimenting application methods to create abstract paintings inspired by her work on view in the exhibition.

Sunday, August 13, The Alfred R. Shands III and Mary N. Shands Masters Series: Vian Sora, 2 pm – 3 pm

Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection Artist Vian Sora in conversation with Contemporary Curator Tyler Blackwell. This is a ticketed event,

Other activities throughout the Speed featuring Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Al Shands Collection

• Art Sparks: Your art is a gift! Engage in the family-friendly art-making activities in Art Sparks and then display your creations for other guests to engage and explore.
• Pick up a Rounding the Circle family-friendly themed activity book at Guest Experiences.
• Pick up a themed gallery guide at Guest Experiences. While you enjoy the exhibition, we invite you to explore your own thoughts, talk with others, and reflect on what you see and learn.

IN THE NEWS

Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum Receives ‘Remarkable’ 177-Piece Gift Rich in Works by Today’s Top Artists – ArtNews

Acquisitions round up: Wu Tsang’s immersive installation from Venice Biennale heads to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – The Art Newspaper

Rounding the Circle – Sophisticated Living Magazine

‘Rounding The Circle: The Mary And Al Shands Collection” Opens at the Speed Museum March 24 – LEO Weekly

Walking Speed: A Curator’s Tour of the Mary and Al Shands Collection – Newcity Art – 06.26.2023

Exhibition presented by:

Additional support for this exhibition provided by:

the huskKY fund
Susan and Allan Lavin
Christina Lee Brown
Cornelia W. Bonnie
Mr. Donald G Wenzel Jr. and Mr. Ron Darnell
Mrs. Edith S. Bingham
Jane Feltus Welch

Media Sponsorship provided by:

Exhibition season support provided by:
Cary Brown and Steven E. Epstein
Sociable Weaver Foundation
Debra and Ronald Murphy
DavFam Art Fund