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 2-mile radius of the museum. They want to get them to come. They are trying everything.
They have to completely redo the museum. 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. And who cares that 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 $35 million and that was only 18 years ago. Move it out!
The museum is undergoing a campus-wide reinstallation and architectural renovation that they say will suit the neighborhood. They hired numerous firms to help them. According to an architectural rendering, it will look like a pot store. 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.
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.
The Impressionist paintings have already been removed.
They are taking the glass art out of the Glass Pavilion and will sprinkle it among the 2-D art in the main building, arranging the art chronologically. The Glass Pavilion will be for special exhibitions and to serve as the graveyard for Impressionist paintings.
They spread 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 dismantling the ancient tile floor and 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 Wolfe Gallery that was built for contemporary art. The funds for the million-dollar renovation of the former glass gallery to be made into a contemporary art gallery were donated by Mary and Fritz Wolfe, who are both dead now.
They don’t care about disrespecting 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, in his experiment to inspire other museums.
“Our visitors will see their histories on display.” In the freshly painted white galleries, they will be installing new benches and Wi-Fi.
For Toledoans, including the Toledo Museum Board of Directors, if they don’t stop this disastrous dismantling of the museum they 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.