I love this story about the Toledo Museum of Art. The author, James Moore, kindly granted me permission to share it here.
They are the words of a highly distinguished curator who got his professional start at the museum. James Moore left Toledo to become the first director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, directing it for over two decades.
In the 1970’s, James Moore served as a coordinator for the Art History department at the Toledo Museum of Art.
It was the most unique workplace I have ever experienced. The professional staff (curators/educators) all met in the restaurant for coffee at 10 and again at 2. It wasn’t required, but it was traditional enough that if you missed one, you apologized and explained at the next one. That was where our informal interaction took place, an activity highly important in any healthy corporate organization but all too often ignored.
At Toledo nobody would have ever thought of dropping into someone’s office just to chat. Once in the saddle and off to work, we were all business.
One day at coffee we were celebrating Bob Phillips’ birthday. While passing out the cake, Roberta Waddell, Curator of Prints humorously prodded everyone to reveal their age. To our surprise, with the exception of Bill Hutton (Senior Curator), who was 50, we were all between the ages of 38 and 41, including Roger Mandle, who was the director then.
Surprised, we sat there looking at each other in silence.
Then Roberta grinned and said: “You know what’s happened, kids? They’ve turned it over to us!”
We laughed but had to fight back the tears. “It,” of course, was the collection.
“They” cast a long shadow indeed, and we could see their work on the walls and feel them following us around every day.
Given “their” example, how could one not do one’s absolute best? How could one possibly let “them” down?
I know of no other story that better explains what it felt like to work at Toledo.
To be a curator is not a matter of selecting things. Curation is, first and foremost, knowledge of and care for, a collection.
The changing of the guards
The culture of the museum carries on, and generations later, there is still a sense of awe and camaraderie amongst the employees. The museum, with its collection, has always been, is, and will always be (unless they sell it) the epitome of excellence.
The collection is the result of a $10 million endowment to the museum from the Libbeys in 1925. The fund would be worth maybe $3.66 billion today if it had only grown 6% annual interest and never had been touched for 101 years. But since it’s been used quite effectively all these years while being conservatively invested, it is worth today about $34 million.
Edward Drummond Libbey and his wife, Florence Scott Libbey wanted to give the people of Toledo a gift. After all, Libbey made his fortune in industrial glass here, and he wanted to give back to his workers, their families, and all the people of the city. He did so in the most democratic way. He endowed a museum with art and art education, and made it forever free for all people to attend.
To make his gift last, Edward Drummond Libbey had an ingenious condition regarding the use of the funds. The condition was that for any money withdrawn, 50% would have to be spent on art. Working in perfect harmony with this plan, curators over time have purchased the very best art for the collection. Today this collection well-exceeds the $3.56 billion 6% return on the original untouched investment. It’s worth well into the many billions. The 57 masterworks that are currently on tour in New Zealand and Australia are worth as a group an estimated $1 billion alone.
The endowment’s 50% rule has transformed itself into a continual stream of new art for the cultural benefit of the people of Toledo, as it was a gift to the people, as per the Libbey will.
The Museum in the Seventies
In the 1970s, when James Moore was there, the museum was well into the swing of it. Being highly culturally productive, it supported the local artists’ expressions and provided to the public an excellent art education, including the venerable program of the year-round city-wide Saturday children’s classes.
Toledo believed that curators were educators first. From the best colleges all over the country, the fellowship program brought together six or more talented young art history scholars a year to work at the museum. Along with gaining first-hand experience with the museum collection, the fellows were required to teach children’s classes. What a gift the children’s education program was to Toledoans, myself included.
Perhaps 50 fellows came through this program during this decade, many going on to prestigious positions in the art world. For example, the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic of the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, and the Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Adam Weinberg.
Adding organically to the picture of the world’s arts culture, the museum gave to the city all of this, and did so, so leanly. The annual budget of the museum was about $1.34 million, or $10.59 million in today’s dollars. (Today’s budget is close to three times that, with none of that anymore.)
All this as the art collection grew.
The 21st century Battle of Toledo
Museum director, Adam Levine, began his tenure in spring of 2020 after the untimely resignation of Brian Kennedy in March of 2019 and the year-long search for a new director, during which John Stanley was hired in the interim.
Adam Levine “leverages” the Libbey collection. He speaks openly about it. He is using the collection to transform the museum right down to the “physical studs.” He is not as much a curator as he is an excavator-turned contractor.
Whereas the museum had always been supported locally, now it goes out of its way to collect donations from any and everywhere possible, strings or no strings. The new sources include anonymous donors, institutional grants, government-related funders of all kinds, and construction-linked donors. These new donors overshadow the long-time local family philanthropy, Toledo corporate giving, and broad membership support that for 125 years has kept the museum going quite successfully, and locally, carrying out Libbeys’ intentions and visions for the people of Toledo.
Adam Levine took advantage during the pandemic by collecting federal public funds meant to help support hurting institutions. He also obtained a two-year variance on the Libbey Endowment 50% rule so that the money earmarked to buy art could be used for the “care of art” instead. Was it to the best advantage of the trust and for the people of Toledo? Considering that he used the money to prepare paintings for shipment outside of the country so that he could leverage the art and finance his makeover of the museum, I would argue that the variance obviously was not in the best interests of the trust, which was to provide culture for the people of Toledo.
He took a $6M federal loan forgiveness in 2021. But who would blame him for taking the free money. But with it, he raised the operating budget fast and high.
His funding even cut into the precious Libbey art collection — in 2022 he sold three exquisite paintings by Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir for $59.7 million dollars. He did not buy art with it as it is stated in the will. He did not put it back into the Libbey Fund earmarked for art purchases. He created a brand-new fund the size of the “Libbey corpus” with the Cezanne and Matisse proceeds, out of sight from public scrutiny of the Libbey Fund.
Attendance never recovered after the pandemic
The museum staff grew by perhaps 50% or more since Adam Levine started. Whereas in 2017 the museum reports 150 employees, in 2025 we hear reports of 350 employees.
One might wonder, what was the point of the increase in staff, because the museum never recovered from the “pandemic rupture,” at least not locally. The attendance reported in the annual reports has been flat since 2021.
Toledo is a union town
One day in 2024, the employees of the visitor services, glass studio, research, education, curatorial and library departments started talking about forming a union. They loved the museum and were passionate about their jobs that they were dedicating their lives to pursuing. They could foresee the future and wanted to protect themselves. They were as unified a group of museum workers today as they had been throughout the museum’s history.
They formed a union, under the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), of about 100 workers, which was officially recognized in the spring of 2025.
A story about the formation of the union, Toledo Art Museum Workers Move to Unionize, was published by Hyperallergic on April 11, 2025.
Skye Sloane, a team leader for visitor services, told Hyperallergic, the reinstallation project is “a significant change to the institution that we all love, and we wanted to band together and feel sure and secure in our new jobs, benefits, and wages, before the project is completed.”
For a museum that boasted of having great employee relations, they shamefully became union busters. Two of the five employees who are pictured in the Hyperallergic photo accompanying the story, among other vocal union organizers, are no longer at the museum today. Skye Sloane, interviewed above, is pictured on the right.
Adam Levine’s idea of a museum sure has funny goals. In light of James Moore’s story about what a noble place it has been to work, this is Objective 3 of Adam Levine’s 2021 five-year strategic plan:
Become an Employer of Choice — Visitors will be “shocked and delighted to be welcomed by a diverse and empowered staff so clearly loving what they do and the institution they serve,” and visitors will also be “eyeing the posted job opportunities, hoping for a chance to work for an institution known widely for treating its staff so well.
You would think that from that absolutely huggable rhetoric, the museum wouldn’t mind employees collectively asking for an employment contract then. You would think that they would respect the employees’ rights to form a union.
After all, Toledo is a union town.
But the elitist, globally ambitious, New Yorker, Adam Levine, is obviously not from around here.
TMA chief people officer Jennifer McCary told Hyperallergic that TMA “respects the democratic process and remain committed to fostering a supportive and collaborative work environment for all employees.”
Yet TMA harassed the union organizers so much that these two employees among others were fired or had to quit.
Letting their guards down
Now, in 2026, as the guards tried to unionize, the museum terminated the guards only to rehire them through an outside company, stripping them of health insurance, retirement benefits, reduced hours and more.
The guards wanted to form a union. They filed a petition with the NLRB to do so. But they were immediately cut off at their knees – given notice that they were being terminated but that they could be rehired by the company called (ironically) “Safeguard.” Safeguard is the outside company that the museum had been using for patrolling outside the building and the parking lot. And now this outside company is in charge of the inside, and the workers who once worked for the museum have been taken down.
The guards were probably the largest category of employees at the museum — I counted 75 names listed one year on an annual report. They are the frontline, the security, the ambassadors, the people that safeguard the art and connect visitors with the art. They are the most beloved employees at the museum, and they have been downgraded and degraded by an ever-ballooning administration that even hired a special chief people officer a few years ago to keep up with the growing staff and instill a culture of belonging (what a joke) — and look what they are doing now.
Adam Levine’s Transformation 2027
As Adam Levine tears the museum down to the studs, removing our art and shipping it all over the world for exhibitions and storing the rest in art storage facilities, he is also destroying the museum’s own corporate foundational ecosphere built to care for the art.
It makes you wonder, is this going to land well, or are we presently witnessing the total implosion of our museum?
Hey Adam — that’s our Rembrandt! Can you please tell us where it is at this exact moment? And where is everything else?
Fun Facts At The intersection of art, labor, unions, philanthropy and Elm and Champlain street
The ghosts of the Battle of Toledo haunt the galleries of the museum. These are the Electric Autolite workers who fought and won rights for workers in 1934.
Four bronze statues created by Hai Ying Wu for a brief time paid tribute to Toledo’s role in America’s labor history. Forged at the university’s sculpture studio behind the museum and installed at Union Memorial Park at Elm and Champlain streets in 2000, they were purchased with the funds of the 1% for the Arts program.
Neglected and vandalized, three of the figures were cut up and sold for scrap. The remaining bronze picketer, covered in bird droppings and holding his picket sign down, was put in storage in 2019. He’s kept out of sight. Hence, the Arts Commission’s short-lived commemoration of the Auto-lite strikers has paid its dues.
The ghost of Clement O. Miniger – founder and president of the Electric Autolite Company, hovers over the striker ghosts, by virtue of all the money he gives to the museum. He’s a major donor.
They wander the barren galleries after the construction workers go home.
Adam Levine mounted a special show where the ghosts can see themselves on the walls – Cursed – across the street at the Glass Pavilion, which is up next for renovation.
Please sign the Petition to enforce Libbey’s will here.
Read more about the petition to enforce Libbey’s will on this page of artistsoftoledo: