They took a jewel of a museum

cracked it and trashed it.

Why don’t they just build their own museum?

“Our visitors will see their histories on display,” so says the new director Adam Levine, who is from New York, as he and the former director John Stanley, also of New York, have their way with Toledo’s once and future

Toledo Museum of Art.

The museum conducted surveys of all the people living in the two-mile radius of the museum. They want to get them to come. They are trying everything. They must completely redo the museum.

They rebranded at great expense, creating a $200K operating deficit for 2023 (they spent much more than that). The redesigned logo looks like a gun scoping you out. It’s animated and dominating and goes back and forth tracking everything you look at. Don’t get in the way because it’s going to kill the artwork. Especially the American and European artwork because it’s not politically correct.

Enough with the European paintings that the Libbeys and others donated. That kind of art, that the museum was built on, does not speak to the people. They don’t like that kind of culture even if it is great art. The amazing thing about a museum is that it has this amazing ability to say whatever the museum puts up on the walls – it’s instantly going to be great art. This is what the new director says after previous directors really did collect great art, which is what really made the Toledo Museum of Art so great. But the new guy replaced the connoisseurs with culture workers and lowered the bar. Because the museum sets the cannon. Boom!

Instead of adding to the collection to create more diversity, he is subtracting from it, and the money’s good. They sold three French Impressionist paintings for 59 million dollars! They can get billions for all the irrelevant art they can subtract from the collection. Boom!

The new Glass Pavilion was designed by the famed Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa specifically for the glass art collection in 2006 for $30 million 18 years ago. But in hindsight that was a mistake and they will correct that — the fixers have arrived.

They are taking the glass collection out of the Glass Pavilion and it will be spread around the 2-D art in the main building, arranged chronologically. The Glass Pavilion will be for special exhibitions and to serve as the graveyard for Impressionist paintings, which have already been removed.

In place of the prominent Impressionist gallery that showed Impressionist art, they will install a display showing Toledo’s glass industry history and the history of the Museum. 

The museum’s campus-wide reinstallation is mostly led by employees and consultants who are brand new. The museum doesn’t bother to mention it in the five-year plan, nor in the 2023 annual report. That’s because they just thought of it. Spending as much money as they can, they hire numerous firms, consulting curators and simpatico fellows to help them, making sure that they are all from out of town.

The Chairman of the Board of the Museum, Sara Jane DeHoff, is thrilled that such noteworthy architects competed for the job, commenting to The Blade in the November 22 article, “I can’t tell you how many international designers applied for this project.” Who wouldn’t want the cushy job of an ambitious renovation and reinstallation from an ambitious museum with supposed unlimited funds?

According to the new architectural renderings, the redone museum will look like a hospital with a bad facelift. The walls are white and devoid of art, and on the floor are curvy glass display tables mazed throughout what looks to be the Great Gallery. People are not happy about it.

Imagine, The Crowning of Saint Catherine, considered to be the best painting by Peter Paul Rubens that is in America, the two paintings called Lot and His Daughters, one by Guercino and one by Artemisia Gentileschi, along with many others being taken off the walls of the Great Gallery. Oh yes they will.

They advanced the rumor that they were getting rid of the Cloisters, only to let it leak that they are just moving the Cloisters.  To a smaller area behind the the ancient art. Imagine the dismantling the ancient tile floor and the taking apart of the delicate and very old four walls of columns, all related in history, that form the Cloister gallery. It will never look or be the same.

To find a spot for the Cloisters, they will dismantle the 12-year old Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery that was built for contemporary art.  It too was a mistake made by previous museum directors that the new people are going to fix now. Two million dollars towards the renovation of the former glass gallery that was made into a contemporary art gallery (mistakenly) was donated (stupidly) by Mary and Fritz Wolfe, who are both dead now.

The new museum people don’t care about respecting donors. They get their money from the government now.

So much for the “stewards” of the “art museum” and their “fiduciary duty” to “care for the art” so that it is “passed on” to “future generations” of “Toledoans.” Adam Levine, a “financial” “crypto” “specialist,” sees the future of museums as being “screen-based.” He is not the best person to be put in charge of caring for and keeping the art and the art museum, let alone to be given the right to remodel it.

It is very risky as well. Remember the disastrous fire of Notre Dame was caused by a mistake made during a renovation.

For Toledoans, including the Toledo Museum Board of Directors, if they don’t stop this disastrous dismantling of the museum we love, the history being made now will leave them with a pathetic legacy, and will leave the city with the loss of what made it so good.

This is a photo of the Libbey grave on Easter 2023 showing that the museum left it in tatters in spite of the directive of the Libbey Endowment. The Libbeys are the founders of the museum.

Why are Toledoans letting this happen to the museum that was meant for them?