so B.A.D.
The success of a museum is measured by the attendance.
While the Toledo Museum of Art, as of June 2026, is closed for renovations, it is important to remember that it was entirely open for visitors through fiscal year 2024, which ended June 30, 2025, 13 months ago.
What’s up with the low attendance?
This chart reflects the annual visitors through June 30, 2025. The numbers are taken from the annual reports. See, here, for the actual pages of annual reports for your own comparison: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.
What does Adam Levine have to say about it?
I didn’t ask, but he volunteered. Here is a bullet point in an email to me, cc’d to the Toledo City Council, Mayor, State Representatives, and The Blade, all of whom I had originally cc’d on my email to the board liaison, Sandhya Holston asking for a current list of board members (the second time I asked, and it was all I asked. This time my email was passed off to Adam Levine to respond, who still didn’t give me the list, but responded with bullet points) ––
Comparisons can be misleading between current attendance and pre-pandemic attendance.
“The Museum changed how it measures success since COVID.”
Because prior to the pandemic, according to Adam Levine, when reporting annual museum visitors in the annual reports and to the press, the previous directors reported anyone who came to the museum for any purpose. In other words, he’s saying that before COVID, the museum fudged the numbers by adding anyone who ever stepped foot into the museum buildings for any reason, including employees, university students in the Gehry building Center for the Visual Arts, wedding rental attendants, business event attendees, contractors, repairmen, construction workers, and not just people coming to see the art.
– Museum visitors (to see the art): 132,000
– Community classes & Family Center: 25,000
and to pad the numbers, we are to surmise that perhaps they added:
– Employees: 50,000
– Student and teacher attendance at CVA: 125,000
– Peristyle attendees: 40,000
– Users of the library: 5,000
– Private venue rental attendees and caterers: 20,000
– Contractors, construction workers & delivery workers: 15,000
– Dog walkers, strollers, joggers, block party attendees: 18,000
–– to comprise the 430,000 visitors.
Levine reports “welcoming” just as many campus visits as the previous directors would report museum visits (but were really campus visits, and now Levine is coming clean with that revelation.)
Adam Levine only counts visitors who come to see the art, unlike his predecessors. In 2025, museum visits totaled 131,733, one-third of what it was pre-pandemic, before he became director.
Wrangling, mangling and rewriting history
Throughout its history, the museum is famous for having the same or more visitors as the population of Toledo year after year. And now, the attendance has dropped to be one-third of what it had always been and the director is telling us that in the past, the previous directors lied to us. Who is doing the lying?
How the museum brought them in
Impressionism, brought in 146,237 visitors alone, in only eight weeks. 393,418 people visited the museum that year, according to the 1991 annual report, an increase of about 98,000 from the previous year, due to the Impressionism show.
In fiscal year 2000, 397,349 visitors took pleasure in the Museum’s renowned collections, exhibitions, and special events.
In 2001, the museum reported that from July 1, 2000 through June 30, 2001, presenting 16 exhibitions that year, 397,349 visitors took pleasure in the Museum’s renowned collections, exhibitions, and special events.
2015: Toledo Museum of Art sets attendance mark
In 2015 the museum set an attendance record — over 440,000. Toledo Museum of Art sets attendance mark, The Blade January 17, 2016. Director Brian Kennedy said,
While the increased attendance numbers are “great,” they don’t necessarily measure the museum’s success, says TMA director Brian Kennedy. Rather, it’s the programming chosen and a measure of the relevancy of the museum itself that drives the institution.
“Attendance numbers are not the most important thing for us. The most important thing for us is visitor satisfaction,” Kennedy said. “We want to be the best in other people’s opinions.”
In 2019, The Blade reported a 3% attendance drop in the article, Attendance falls at Toledo Museum of Art, January 15, 2019.
The numbers are in line with overall museum attendance, which dropped 2.8 percent from 423,145 people to 411,123, according to TMA’s recently released annual report. The 12,000- person decrease was less than in fiscal year 2017, when attendance dropped by almost 34,000 people.
Those numbers don’t alarm museum officials, who say the museum has consistently seen more than 400,000 visitors come through its doors annually in recent years.
“While attendance is something we do track and report on, how the museum really benchmarks its success is two-fold: the quality of what we offer the public and in return, what visitors say about the museum,” Ms. Elton said.
Attendance of special exhibitions is reported:
– The Mummies: From Egypt to Toledo, 2018: 33,228
– Fired Up: Contemporary Glass by Women Artists, 2018: 34,849
– Rebecca Louise Law: Community, 2018: 44,817
– Kehinde Wiley, 2017: 69,000
– Play Time including the Red Ball project, 2016: 135,000
Fast-forward to post-covid
It takes a real effort to bring the people in.
“Our curatorial team has tripled while our exhibitions budget has nearly doubled.” Adam Levine wrote in an email to TMA members in March 2023.
Whereas 16 shows annually had been the norm in the past, in 2025, the museum had only five exhibitions, with only two shows in the major temporary exhibition spaces:
– Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art (Levis Galleries)
– Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms (Canaday Gallery)
Now, in 2026, all of the sprawling galleries of the white-pillared museum building are closed and the art has been removed – it has been rented overseas, loaned throughout the U.S., and stored off-site, out of town while they “renovate.”
What was Director Adam Levine doing all these years with a tripled curatorial staff and a doubled exhibition budget? We know now, as they were shutting down the museum, that they were actually really busy working on secret international blockbuster exhibitions with the masterworks. Secret, because no announcements were made to the Toledo public, who had to find out through foreign news stories that most of their best masterworks were overseas in unprecedented institutional “loans.”
Faced with having to report pathetic post-COVID museum attendance statistics, which really look bad compared to other museums, Adam Levine informs us that the past has been a fraud – the museum was dishonest with the public, implying that all the reporters at The Blade writing about museum attendance throughout the years had to have been dumb and gullible, as were all of the museum stakeholders, all those many years.
What a deceit.
The founders of the museum intended for the museum to be maintained in Toledo and for the art to be displayed in Toledo. The Libbey will is clear: the museum is for Toledo.
But Adam Levine had a different idea: change the measurement of success by leveraging our art and betraying our legacy.
I was merely asking for a current list of board members. It seemed outrageous to me that they didn’t simply send it to me the first time I asked, so when I had to ask a second time, I cc’d the city council, state representatives and the press. I expected the reply to be straight-forward: a list of current board members.
I wanted a list of current board members, since the list was not current on the TMA website, and I wanted to see who the three newly announced board members were replacing.
Can you believe the audacity of Adam Levine to use my email to broadcast to city council, state representatives and the press that previous directors had falsely reported museum attendance, and that recent attendance is equal to what it had been when our museum used to be great?
This goes way beyond gaslighting. It’s difficult to grasp how our museum is being used and abused, torn apart and lied about, all in plain sight.