Inka Essenhigh | Speed Art Museum

Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Alfred Shands Collection

March 24, 2023 – August 6, 2023
3rd Floor, North Building 

The Speed Art Museum presents Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Alfred 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 150 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.

Rounding the Circle: The Mary and Alfred Shands Exhibition in the News