The Blade’s January 4, 2025 faulty news story by Lillian King begs for corrections.
A new vision: Looking back on TMA’s 2024 acquisitions
“The thought was that if we focus on quality, we’ll end up not only with a superlative collection, but we’ll end up with a collection that tells a global art history,” Adam Levine is thinking. He probably means, if you want to tell a story about global art history, and if you focus on quality, you will end up with a superlative collection. But he also says that the museum has the superpower to wave a magic wand and make great art out of crap. So what is it?
The writer points out that the museum had 386 new acquisitions in 2023, up from 60 in 2022. She did not mention that that includes the 306 Japanese Netsukes (little toggles) donated by Richard R. Silverman to go along with the hundreds of other such pieces that he had previously donated. This repetition expands on world art history? 30 of the 386 acquisitions are photographs donated by Spencer Stone. 19 are works on paper by Barbara Jones-Hugo (who?), some purchased & some donated by the art dealer David Lusenhop of Cleveland, who sold them the controversial burnt American flag piece in 2022. The museum also acquired six works on paper and one 3-D object by Matt Wedel, the ceramist who had the five-month long show in 2022-2023 that filled up the Levis Gallery with “Phenomenal Debris.” Reflected in that title, the new acquisitions are nothing to brag about.
The writer falsely claims that “as a non-profit institution, TMA is obligated to educate on the entire world,” which is absurd. Did Adam Levine tell her that and she blindly repeated it? Comparing their new acquisitions to their mission to cover the entire globe, the writer equates it to the “coming of fruition” of the founders’ dream of “building an art collection of the highest caliber.”
The writer fails to mention that the overwhelming majority of the recent acquisitions do not advance the museum’s ambitious new mission to expand the narrative of world art history, in fact it defeats it. Quality, not quantity, made our encyclopedic museum collection great.
The writer cutely writes that “Egyptian curios and mummified cats wouldn’t cut it anymore.” Obviously she knows nothing about the museum’s collection. If only she would have read her own newspaper’s article two weeks before about the newly appointed assistant curator of ancient art, Roko Rumora. Here’s what he said: “In the field of classical archaeology and ancient art history, the Toledo Museum of Art is something of a household name. TMA’s ancient collections are among the richest and most diverse in the United States…”
The Libbeys founded an art museum, but it seems that Adam Levine wants to turn it into a folk art natural history museum to cover every civilization and time period and call it art, perhaps to influence the art market.
The museum has lost direction and the director has run off with it.
Why is Adam Levine literally tearing apart the museum that we love, selling great art and not replacing them with new art as per the rules of Libbey Endowment, nor putting the proceeds back in the Libbey Endowment (which is accountable to the public), but keeping it separate and private? He’s moving the museum further away from the founders, adding layers of bureaucracy, remodeling the interior and exterior and shifting everything around including the removal of the glass art out of the Glass Pavilion that was just built in 2006 for the display of the glass art collection. What drastic changes, yet Adam Levine has a fiduciary duty to care for the art and the art museum for future generations. But he’s minimized the founders wishes and rules for the museum by selling three paintings so valuable that they are equal to the value of the Libbey Endowment, and used the paintings gifted by Edward Drummond Libbey to loosen the ties to Edward Drummond Libbey and blur his vision.
Gaslighting
Adam Levine arrogantly says that the superpower of museums is that they can display anything and the art world will call it quality. That’s no dream — that’s Libbey’s nightmare.
Buying moccasins and marked-up bear skins and editioned statues of life-size armless women with their midriffs split in two just won’t cut it, for more than a season or two.