The church has been captured by the institution, but the church is much more than the institution.” Likewise, the lives of artworks are much more than their tenure in a museum. “I have always been leery of institutions in general. “The gallery system is like a church in how congregations are drummed up and cultivated,” Shands notes. The Shands collected significant work by Sol LeWitt, as well as pieces by Richard Long, Alice Aycock, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Petah Coyne, Judy Moonelis, Elizabeth Murray, David Nash, Ernesto Neto, Alfredo Jaar, Javiar Perez, Judy Pfaff, Jaume Plensa, Siah Armajani, Kibong Thee, Arturo Sandoval, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, Joel Shapiro, Vik Muniz, Alyson Shotz, Kiki Smith, Donny Tolson, Peter Shelton, Mary Miss, Jim Dine, Scott Burton, Andy Goldsworthy, Eric Fischl, Maya Lin, and the list goes on. Shands and his late wife Mary Norton Shands built the house as an ode to the landscape, and as a stage for their large collection of ceramics, glass, sculpture, photography, and painting. This is the American heartland, where conservative social and religious values thrive. The entire collection is housed at his estate Great Meadows in Crestwood, Kentucky, a pastoral dreamland of rolling hills, blue grasses, wild flowers, and roaming cows. Shands’s collection of contemporary art that will be bequeathed to Louisville’s Speed Art Museum upon his death is, similarly, and provocatively, idiosyncratic. We used the mixing bowl as the baptismal font, the wine came from the bar, our bread was the rolls they served and our altar was the table.” For Shands, “The religious encounter is like a dinner party.” “The only place we could afford to start meeting was in the restaurant. For six years during the 1960s, Shands was able to maintain this unusual congregation. “I find the wholesome, institutional nature of the church rather boring. LOUISVILLE, Kentucky - Long before Reverend Al Shands bought his first contemporary artwork, he founded an Episcopal church that met weekly at a Washington, D.C. Al Shands beside a work by Sol Lewitt on the grounds of his estate outside Louisville, Kentucky.
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