Tag: Adam Levine

Museum shrinking away from founders

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date April 17, 2023

Founders of our so-called "Eurocentric" museum in Egypt, in Africa

The Toledo 2-Mile Radius Museum of Art

It’s Edward Drummond Libbey’s birthday today – he was born on April 17, 1854. Some people care – like the alumni of the high school named after Mr. Libbey that was torn down in 2012 and never replaced, and the runners of the “Florence Scott Libbey 419 Race” in honor of Edward Drummond Libbey’s wife. As for the Toledo Museum of Art, they stopped putting flowers on his grave, letting his memorial look terrible one week ago on Easter Sunday, a day that the museum is required to decorate the grave with flowers, as stipulated by the Florence Scott Libbey Endowment. (see my last post, No flowers for the Libbeys the year.)

Adam Levine’s recent guest editorial in The Blade

After my guest editorial in The Blade on March 18, where I showed that the museum is moving away from the wishes of the Libbeys, Adam Levine countered with his own editorial on March 26, “Museum growing on mission set by founders,” where he grasped to make connections with the founders – as if words, regardless of deeds, would make it so.

I found a lot of inconsistencies in his editorial. Here they are.

Comments on Adam Levine’s March 26, 2023 editorial

First of all, it was George Stevens’ wife, Nina Spalding Stevens, who instituted the art classes. At least give her that much credit. Nina and George ran the museum together. Yes, a woman was a partner in running our museum, way back in 1903. Imagine that.

Secondly, the adult classes back then in the beginning and through at least the 1970’s and 1980’s were quite extensive, nothing like we have now, and to say that they are “as we still know them” is just not true.

The museum let the richness of the adult art classes slip away when the university took over by hiring their own faculty in the 1990’s when moving to the new Gehry building that is attached to the museum. The adult population now has to pay a ridiculous tuition and unfair activity fees to take the university art classes. It’s a great disservice to the community. Over in the museum basement in the old school, there’s not much going on.

This is not true, I went to the University of Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design in the early 1970’s and my art classes were university credits.

My sister went to the University of Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design in the 1960’s and her art classes were university credits.

Many artists on this website had art classes at the museum that were applied to their University of Toledo BA degree, going back to the 1940’s, maybe earlier, such as Carroll Simms, LeMaxie Glover, Edith Franklin (who had her credits for her art classes in the 1940’s and 1950’s applied toward her degree in 1987, when she turned 65 and wanted to get her degree so she could teach. All she had to do was pay the extra amount to the university, as adults could take adult art classes at the museum in the past without being a university student, and it was cheaper. University students pay university tuition.)

Except that Adam Levine has shrunk it.

Again, Adam Levine invokes our great museum’s reach when he has actually shrunk the museum’s focus from a community of over a half a million down to a community of 18,000 people all within a small 2-mile radius, forsaking the larger community that is 36.111 times that in head count, from a number which reflects the museum’s local reach in their own words, noted in their 5-year strategic plan – “its 650,000-person metropolitan statistical area.” (see below)

The Libbey Endowment Trust variance

In the summer of 2020, the museum filed a petition with the Lucas County Probate Court for a temporary variance on the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Trust to use less than the trust-stipulated 50% of the annual draw on the purchases of art, on account of the economic hardship of the pandemic. They were granted, for two years, ending July 1, 2022, the use of $150,000 per year to be taken from the art purchase fund to be used on “direct care costs of art” instead of on buying art. And I am guessing they did the same thing with the Florence Scott Libbey Endowment Trust, as well.

So it seems contradictory that the museum was able to increase their budget by 20% during the past three years – years that they were claiming hardship and diverting art-purchase funds. And during this time they also sold three of our famous paintings for $59 million, claiming to want to spend it on new art. All it’s been spent on so far is a new financial vehicle that’s making money for financial people.

5-year plan said so

Also, this contradicts the statement in The Blade on March 9, 2021, reporting that the 5-year plan calls for decreasing the percentage the museum draws annually from the Libbey endowment —

The plan calls for financial changes that include increasing the budget from about $18 million to $20 million, and decreasing the percentage the museum draws annually from an endowment that founder Edward Drummond Libbey established for the museum upon his death in 1925.

over budget already, and it’s only been 2 years

Also, the increase in the budget two years ago was about 12%, but now he is saying the budget has increased by 20% — 8% more than the 5-year plan called for.

the remote control of the museum

Why do we have curators who live outside of Toledo? Adam Levine hired a consulting curator, Lanisa Kitchiner, for the museum’s African collection. Although the museum doesn’t mention it in their press release, she is the Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with an educational background in literature, African studies and politics, not art history.

Why did the museum hire a curator of ancient art, Carlos Picon, the director of the Colnaghi art gallery in New York, who is an ancient art dealer? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

What is going on that the Toledo Museum of Art is hiring people from out of town who do not live in Toledo, or even in Ohio, to run our museum remotely?

Why “rebrand” the museum?

Adam Levine started a brand-new department, Brand Strategy, to redefine our museum, hiring Gary Gonya, who lives in Colorado, as the director of the department. First, Adam Levine painted our museum as being somehow elitist if not downright white supremacist, (see, Blade article, June 2021) when it had always been a progressive, democratic museum for all of the people.

“Art museums…Elite. Erudite…but for many, the word ‘inaccessible’ must also be included on that list.”

“…their auras of excellence can deter the average citizen from feeling they are places to frequent, enjoy, and learn from without having a gold-embossed degree in one’s back pocket.”

“the art museum really is looked at as a place for the people on the river…”

“Mayor Kapszukiewicz said there historically has been a sense that the art museum was a place for the Florence Libbeys of the world. Mrs. Libbey was a patron of art married to Edward Drummond Libbey, the owner of Libbey Glass Co. and the art museum’s president from 1901–1925.”

Then Gary Gonya came in and said, “We will develop an inclusive brand voice and experience that inspires all people and awakens their connection to the deep human story we all share.” Art Matters, Winter/Spring 2022

Now Adam Levine harks back to the museum’s founders, claiming ownership of the museum’s progressive, democratic history.

It’s as if what they have done by discriminating against most of the people in the Toledo metropolitan area in favor of people who live in a small geographic area, and by selling our best paintings, isn’t actually a big break from the founding principles instead.

A new Communications Manager, a department which is now overseen by Brand Strategy, was hired at the museum who was living in Lansing Michigan. She appeared on TV saying that Toledoans want to see themselves on the walls. She wrote and edited a belated quarterly Art Matters Magazine in September 2022, and then after just a few months of museum employment, she left. There has not been another Art Matters Magazine since then.

TMA was greater when the budget was half as much

Even though they have added the Branding Department, a Chief People Officer and a Director of Belonging and Community Engagement and fully staffed these new departments, and even though they spend $3.6 million more this year than they did three years ago, the museum has not managed to continue the things that has made it great.

The School of Design made the museum great. The great Saturday Children’s Class program that was coordinated with the Board of Eduction to provide about 2,500 public school children (parochial school children too) with an extensive, full-school-year program of art classes is what made the museum great. Free at first, then nearly free.

The adult art class culture and community that the museum used to have made the museum great.

The annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition that brought together the region’s art community, that celebrated their creativity and made everyone feel part of it and welcome made the museum great.

Selling our valuable and historic art

It is so ironic that while expanding budgets and commandeering endowment fund art allocations for other uses, that Adam Levine took away perhaps the most important thing that made our museum great.

Adam Levine sold three of our world-class famous historical French Impressionist paintings that we had in our collection for a very long time. These paintings were a substantial part of the museum’s small but strong collection of French Impressionism. These paintings meant so much to our community, and people came from near and far to see them. They were very accessible. Cezanne is considered the father of modern painting.

The museum’s great art made our museum great.

Invoking Libbey to pass off a lie

Adam Levine took our Cezanne, The Glade, right off the wall and sold it for $41.7 million. He lied to us about the reason why he was doing that, saying that the painting was mediocre and Libbey would have wanted us to get rid of it, and that the museum never meant to have two examples of any one artist.

He embarrassed us to world by promising our other Cezanne to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Cezanne Exhibition taking place concurrently, which is documented full page in the show’s catalog as being in the show. Instead he sold our other Cezanne, The Glade, right off the wall, just two days after the opening of the important Cezanne Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Just wondering why the art acquisition numbers indicate that a lot more art was bought during that time? I saw a work with the number 2022.92. That would indicate it was the 92nd work bought in 2022. And he states here that they acquired only 75 works over 2 years. Did they buy and sell works to flip them, perhaps? Funny thought but with all the weirdness going on at the museum, I wouldn’t put it past them.

TMA has never not explored world art

The Toledo Museum of Art has always explored art of the entire world, it doesn’t need to raise budgets and hire more employees to do so. What the museum needs are art curators who are connoisseurs, not statistical survey satisfiers.

Unimpressive shows and few of them

I counted only five shows in 2022, and they were unimpressive. Two shows in the past two years were showing the restoration of artwork. The second show like this, in the fall of 2022, was used as a fundraiser to raise money for the restoration of certain pieces, which is funny because the restoration of art is what the Libbey variance of 2020 was about (“direct care of art”) – the museum received extra money for this use, yet there they are trying to get the public to pay for the restoration of the glass dress that represents the Libbeys themselves. The variance diverting Libbey’s money for the restoration of art was not even used to care for Libbey’s deeply important and meaningful legacy.

The shape of things to come

The coming show about extinct birds, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo is running an extra-long time for a show at a museum that claims to be working on bringing in repeat visitors – seven long months – from April 29 to Nov. 26. The show is not sponsored by the Libbey Endowment Fund. Instead, it’s sponsored by 8 different sponsors, including corporations, donors, foundations and the Ohio Arts Council: “Presenting sponsors Susan and Tom Palmer, Season sponsor ProMedica, Platinum sponsors Taylor Cadillac, the Rita B. Kern Foundation, and The Trumbull Family and Silver sponsor Dana Charitable Foundation. Additional support provided by the Ohio Arts Council and the Boeschenstein Family Foundation.” All those corporate sponsors, and still, the museum is charging $10 for non-members to see it.

Nearest neighbors being left out? a big lie

First of all, the museum is free and the doors are open. We can thank Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey for that. The museum has always welcomed everyone, since Day 1.

The museum’s 2021 5-year strategic plan puts TMA’s reach at 650,000 people for the Toledo Metropolitan area. Over the decade, they report having about 380,000 visitors per year.

The 2-mile radius is 12.57 square miles and the Toledo Metropolitan area is 240 square miles. So therefore, the 2-mile radius of the museum is only 5.24% of the museum’s Toledo Metropolitan area. 8% of the museum’s attendance from the 2-mile radius neighborhood is a lot more than 5.24%, and 14% is way more. So how have the “nearest neighbors” been left out?

“An active approach to community outreach not only increases the level of offsite programming, but in so doing, it allows TMA employees to create personal relationships and invite program participants individually to visit the Museum,” the plan reads. The Blade, March 9, 2021, Museum outlines 5-year plan of growth

All this effort the museum has recently made to hire more people (raising the museum’s budget by $3.6 million with public and private grants) to befriend and make personal relationships with a select area of their total reach, and to hand-hold these neighborhood people to get more to come to the museum, and to pass out free memberships (good for free parking and special shows) at the expense of all other visitors who are not members to which they raised the parking fee by 45%, has made the statistics grow to 14% for the visitors being from the 2-mile radius – a large percentage compared to the overall population of the museum’s reach – but are they accounting for less people coming from other areas? Is reducing the attendance of the other areas part of the plan too? Because they are absolutely leaving everyone else out.

A siphon and a funnel

It’s like a siphon of most of the former efforts the museum made for the entire community being funneled into one place – the 2-mile radius.

Closing museum on a Friday to dismantle the Great Gallery for a private party for themselves and the 2-mile radius

The museum was closed on a Friday in October 2021 to put on a private concert with John Legend that was supposedly for the kids in their outreach program but ended up being a private party for adults. Using the Great Gallery, where most of the Old Master paintings are displayed including the Peter Paul Rubens, they removed the paintings from the gallery walls, risking damage to the museum’s most valuable collection, and replaced them with contemporary paintings by black artists. Information was initially released that it would be for the neighborhood kids they are doing outreach for. However, it was reported in the Sojourners Truth newspaper after the concert that only 40 children attended, who came from the seven different “communities” within the 2-mile radius of the museum. Along with 400 adults who had a party for themselves. Printing a full-page photo of their private concert in the 2021 annual report, the museum asserted that the museum would be doing more private functions like this in the future.

Not very Libbey-like

Why would the museum close its doors to the public on a busy day to have a private party with the neighborhood? Why does the museum feel that the people from the neighborhood can’t relate to the great collection that the museum presently has? Isn’t that a supreme insult to people of the neighborhood? Or is it all just a smokescreen to sell off our great paintings?

Art-making experiences for seniors in the 2-mile radius only
siphoning $9,998 per art-making session

The Toledo Museum of Art just received a grant to give art lessons/art experiences to senior citizens in senior centers. See story in M-Living here: Toledo museum program takes art to older adults

The grant, for $119,916, from Michelson Philanthropy, “a pioneer in creative aging,” will be used to give a 6-session art program at two senior centers serving seniors in the special “2-mile radius” this summer, summer of 2023. That works out to be $9,993 for each art-making session.

There are many seniors all over the city of Toledo, many of them who have never been to the Toledo Museum of Art as well, and to isolate a small section of Toledo to pour $119,916 into 2 senior centers for just 12 art making sessions this summer is divisive, strange, and unbelievable. Toledo has 14 or so Senior Centers, and most of them are out of luck. Many people in their communities are feeling unwanted, isolated, lonely, poor and miserable. Survivors of the pandemic, but for what. To emerge into a world that literally doesn’t want them anymore.

we made you but now we decided to eliminate you

The museum made note in their 5-year strategic plan that they have way too many older educated white women. They don’t like us anymore, so I guess we have to sit the rest of our lifetime out.

How could the museum have known, when we were little children, educated at the museum’s Saturday classes and also having college classes at the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design, that we would stay so interested in art when we would grow up – that we would enjoy going to the museum so much that it would make the Twenty-first Century museum director’s socio-economic and racially profiled and ageist statistics explode his mind? There are some people that don’t fit in to their new branding – also called, discrimination.

Adam Levine’s solution is to cut us out, just like he got rid of the French Impressionist paintings that skewed their art collection so male and so white.

Over the past decade the Museum has received, on average, 380,000 visits per year, which as a percentage of its 650,000-person metropolitan statistical area ranks it among the top five most visited art museums per capita, according to annual statistics from the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Though TMA can claim a history of executing on quality and community, this Museum, like so many others, has implemented its strategies in ways that have not been equally inclusive or equally accessible. Though TMA is known across the world for its outstanding collection, that collection reflects a Eurocentric view of the world. Likewise, the demographic attributes of those 380,000 annual visitors skew Caucasian, female, older, affluent, and highly educated. – TMA Strategic Plan 2021

Exactly WHAT strategies have not been inclusive or accessible? Our museum is NOT “like so many others.” Our museum has been collecting diverse art from the very beginning. For example the Henry Ossawa Tanner painting purchased in 1913, for just one example.

Nothing has ever stopped the museum from making diverse purchases. They have been buying quite a lot of non-European-type-non-white-male art for the past several decades. in fact, I made a survey of art acquired by the museum from 2017 to 2022, and it lines up pretty closely to U.S. Census statistics of nationality and race. See my survey here: The Artists of Toledo Report.

Are they going for full collection-wide parity? Are they not going to collect art by white men altogether?

Money and politics

Could it be that they are using the outreach program to politically organize the 2-mile area, using the neighborhood as a pet anthropological experiment?

Will their radicalism in our meek Midwest town that lets them do anything win them the fame they so desperately seek?

expanding? or pushing us over the edge?

The museum is leaving everyone else out. The museum has always been about art, but now it seems they have traded art for money and politics. Lots of grant money for the taking. They are doing focused outreach in this 2-mile radius area, which is what the Arts Commission had always done in the past.

The museum should be a museum. Let the arts commission be the arts commission.

Adam Levine is the steward of our museum, it is not his to remake.

People come to the museum. It has art. It has education. It has a beautiful marble pillared building. It is a place for personal contemplation. It is not a place to be bullied. It is not a place to be beaten over the head with politics.

People who run the museum first and foremost must care for the art for future generations. They shouldn’t be selling it off. They shouldn’t be trying to make themselves famous at the expense of Toledoans. It’s ridiculous that they claim to want to remake our museum to set an example for all other museums to follow. As if to let them recreate our museum for the sake of their own notoriety among other museums would make us proud. Our museum was a great example for other museums from the beginning, but it never set out to make fame its priority. The art and the people of Toledo were always the museum’s priority, and should be now.

Our museum always used to welcome everyone and was fair to everyone. Our museum served everyone. Our museum never had to do surveys on the race or gender or income level of their visitors. Our museum never discriminated against people based on their zip code, but they love doing that now.

What George Stevens said in 1903

What would our founders think?

What do you think?

Tags Adam Levine, Carlos Picón, George Stevens, Lanisa Kitchiner, Libbey, Libbey Endowment, Otto Wittmann, Owens Corning, Promedica, Roger Mandle, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design

Artists of Toledo

No flowers for the Libbeys this year

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date April 10, 2023

I wrote a blog post last year on May 31 titled “Edward and Florence’s Wills.” I had gone to see their decorated graves that Memorial Day weekend, after reading their wills in the aftermath of the unconscionable sale of our three famous historical French Impressionist paintings. The whole premise of the post was how the new direction of the museum was moving away from the intentions that the Libbeys had for the museum.

https://artistsoftoledo.com/2022/05/31/edward-and-florences-wills/

At the end of the post I wrote this:

Why does the museum put flowers on the grave of the Libbeys, three times a year — on Easter Day, Memorial Day, and on November 13?

Because they have to – it’s in Florence Scott Libbey’s will. But I wonder, since Adam Levine and the museum trustees are making such swift and radical changes out from under the original intentions of the founders of our great, progressive museum — calling our museum out for being somehow socially unjust, when our museum has been the most democratic and forward-thinking museum of them all, selling artwork gifted by the Libbeys to make a new acquisition endowment, just how long will the trustees be keeping those flowers going on that grave?

It didn’t take the museum long to forget about the Libbeys. Here are photos showing the state that the Libbey Memorial was in on Easter Day, 2023.

No flowers. The Libbey cemetery lot was a mess at high noon, with dead Christmas-decorated plants in broken plastic pots tipped over and strewn aside the monument, the monument itself stained with algae and dirt.

Before I left, when I was walking back to the road, I witnessed people walking by it, hearing their banter in the distance mentioning Libbey, because Libbey is famous and loved by Toledoans, and I watched the two women attempt to put the plastic broken pot upright on the steps of the monument.

I spoke to the man with the two women, who pointed out that the three cut glass orbs that were part of the monument, in front of it, were made from a process that Libbey Glass Company was known for. I hadn’t noticed that before, I thought they might have been lights at one time.

The responsible parties for keeping up the cemetery plot are the Trustees of the Trust (different from the trustees or directors of the museum, but they are interchangeable and at this time, two of them are on both of the boards — Elizabeth Brady and Deke Welles.)

That’s the kind of shambles our museum is in too. Pray for it.

Tags Adam Levine, Libbey, Libbey Endowment, Toledo Museum of Art

Artists of Toledo

Museum paints a divisive narrative

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date March 22, 2023

The Disciples on the Sea, Henry Ossawa Tanner, about 1910
acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art in 1913

Here’s what Toledo Museum’s Belonging and Community Engagement Director Rhonda Sewell said, in regard to the museum’s politically motivated DEAI plan, “What it’s saying is that now we are not only going to look at maybe one ethnicity or one race or one region for art history’s sake in our collection.”

The new museum administrators paint our museum as having been racist. Perhaps that is to justify the radical changes they are making, from the narrowing of the museum’s community focus, to the selling of our famous French Impressionist paintings, and now they report the reinstallation the American gallery in the narrow gallery at the back of the museum, moved from the large elegant American galleries of the west wing (that were endowed by the Barbers.) It seems that the museum founded by the Libbeys for all citizens of Toledo is being dismantled and transformed into something entirely different. My letter to Michael Bauer, CEO of Libbey, Inc. who is new this year to the Board of Directors of the Toledo Museum of Art.

March 21, 2023

Dear Mr. Bauer,

As a new board member of the Toledo Museum of Art, I thought you would be interested in my editorial about the Museum that was published in The Blade on Saturday. I’ve attached a clipping for your convenience.

I’ve written to all of the board members several times during last year, but my concerns have never been addressed. I have a website that is pretty detailed about the issues written about in my editorial. artistsoftoledo.com

It’s a shame that these issues need to be brought up. We used to have a wonderful museum that was beyond reproach. It served the entire community, not just a two-mile radius. The Libbeys would not have wanted that, and Mr. Libbey wouldn’t have wanted the paintings sold, diminishing the Museum’s great Impressionist collection to replace his endowment with a new endowment of equal amount, which circumvents the rules he set down for the use of the money and removes him from the picture. The money should have been used to buy art, or it should have been put back into the Libbey Endowment for new purchases of art as soon as possible. The art bought with that money should credit Libbey, not a new endowment.

Our museum had always been for everybody. But today, Adam Levine and Rhonda Sewell (who came to work at the museum with no museum experience, and learned about art museums on the job) have made our museum divisive, using diversity as the excuse.

Rhonda Sewell was quoted in The Blade on October 1, 2022 in regard to the museum’s politically motivated DEAI plan, “What it’s saying is that now we are not only going to look at maybe one ethnicity or one race or one region for art history’s sake in our collection,” yet that is a blatant misrepresentation of the Museum, which has always been one of the most progressive community oriented museums in the country. Funny that the painting they use for promoting their American Art installation, which is by the black artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner, was acquired by the Museum in 1913. But they are quick to erase the Museum’s legacy to paint a false narrative that our Museum has never been diverse.

In response to a survey of museums made by Artnet titled the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, in which the Toledo Museum took part, I made my own survey of the art bought by just the Toledo Museum from 2017 to 2022. My survey is here, The Artists of Toledo Report. It shows an uncanny balance of the percentages of art acquired of American artists by race and sex relative to population percentages of race and sex. In my research of historic Toledo artists, almost all of whom have had a close relationship with the Museum, it shows a good percentage of notable black artists throughout the history of notable local artists, from Frederick Douglass Allen, born in 1886, an early art student of the Museum’s once-great art school who participated in eight Toledo Area Artists Exhibitions including the first one, to Carroll Simms and LeMaxie Glover in the 1940’s and 50’s who got their start at the Museum School of Design and were given scholarships to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art by a wealthy museum patron, Mrs. McKelvy (who donated her French Impressionist paintings in a specially female-curated collection she gave to the citizens of Toledo via the Museum, from which her Renoir was plucked and sold – so much for honoring women), to the “Black Artists of Toledo” exhibitions that the Museum had in the 1970s and 80’s, to the first black board member of the Museum in the 1990s. And that’s not to mention all of the diverse art collected by the Museum throughout the past century including the African collection that was started in the 1950’s, and especially all of the art acquired in the past 20 years, including art bought for the museum by the Apollo Society. I don’t see how anyone can fault our museum for not being diverse.

To now frame the Museum as having been white art only, and then to disenfranchise the community outside of a two-mile radius is terrible. The Museum should be expanding its reach, not shrinking it. Whereas the Museum for many decades educated 2,500 children from all over the city in a Saturday Class program for children who really wanted it, Adam Levine exploits our communal memory of that program by saying he is bursting “out of the walls” building art making stations for 18,000 residents of low-income housing developments and equipping them with art teachers. People still believe that the Museum has that wonderful Saturday children’s classes program, but today it is a mere sliver of what it once was. The Museum is living on a reputation that it can no longer live up to. The Museum’s school should have grown, not shrunk. Here’s my proposal for how the Museum can start to rebuild the school — and do outreach at the same time.

If you think it’s fair to the citizens of Toledo to have taken that away from the general public and funnel most of the Museum’s educational efforts into a government housing project, I’d really like to know your reasoning. If the children’s Saturday class program had not been available to me growing up, I would not be the artist I am today, and that goes for a lot of Toledo artists. I lived five miles away from the Museum and attended Toledo public schools. I went to the Saturday classes for all the years that it was open for me. It helped me have a successful artistic career in New York. I have work in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I have the Toledo Museum to thank. But now that opportunity has been taken away from most of the youth of Toledo.

Thank you for your time. I’d love to hear back from you.

Tags 2022 Burns Halperin Report, Adam Levine, Carroll Simms, DEAI, LeMaxie Glover, Libbey, Libbey Endowment, Otto Wittmann, Promedica, Rhonda Sewell, The Blade, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design

Artists of Toledo

Adam Levine’s Toledo Museum of Art

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date March 8, 2023

An assessment of the offerings at
Adam Levine’s Toledo Museum of Art
two years into the five-year plan

In 2021, Adam Levine, the new director of the Toledo Museum of Art, announced that he was increasing the museum’s annual budget by $2 million while reducing the draw from the Libbey Endowment. The rules of the Libbey Endowment are such that the money must be used in whole or in part for the exhibition of art, with at least 50% of every dollar spent on the purchase of works of art for the purpose of public exhibition. To draw less from the Libbey Endowment means they are free to do what ever they want. They don’t need to buy art or have great shows anymore.

Just as we had been warned, the shows since then have been sparse and less spectacular. We’ve had Matt Wedel, regional mid-career ceramicist, and his “Phenomenal Debris” filling up the Levis Gallery Nov. 5, 2022 — Apr. 2, 2023, which, as the name suggests, was a real departure for the Toledo Museum of Art, and not in a good way. Meanwhile in the Canaday Gallery, in a redo of a show from two years ago, they decked out the Canaday with artwork in need of repair and solicited donations for the restorations, for the privilege of the donor’s name being briefly associated with the “adopted artwork.” The piece used in the promotion was a 1925 glass dress, representing Libbey himself, ironically, to raise money for restoration instead of using the museum and Libbey’s money to restore the dress. So tacky of them. The show was up an extra-long time, from Sept 24, 2022 to Feb. 5, 2023. Now they give us a show about astrology and fortune-telling curated by the two new Brian P. Kennedy Leadership Fellows (formerly known as Mellon Fellows) who drew from the museum’s own collection. Feb. 3, 2023 — Jun. 18, 2023, because that is just what they think we like, after we endured the Supernatural traveling show in 2021.

Meanwhile, as evidenced by features in the sporadically published Art Matters Magazine and nearly every press release Levine manages to put out, they go on and on about their curatorial work writing wall text and rearranging galleries, as if they are preparing us for a terrible fright. Lately, they have been moving art around in the American galleries so that the artworks will talk to each other and tell us the TRUE meaning of being an American. Because, as they tell us, being an American changes all the time, and you need to listen to the paintings, look closely and see how they interact. Do they like each other? Can they get along? If you still don’t get it, read the wall text.

But coming to Toledo this summer just in time for Juneteenth is the enthusiastically inspired traveling show called Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club, June 3 – Sept. 3. It is co-curated by Brooklyn Museum’s young up-and-comer Kimberli Gant, who wrote an accompanying book about the Black American artist (1917–2000) and the 1960’s Nigerian art scene. Read about Jacob Lawerence here on this unrelated time-capsule of a website from the Whitney Museum in 2002, too good not to share.

It is interesting that it is Kimberli Gant’s family who originally owned the burnt miniature American flag piece that the museum acquired last year, purchased with funds from the bequests “by exchange” of dead patrons who happened to have been veterans who fought under the American flag in World War II. Would these Toledo veterans have approved of their money being used to buy a burnt flag? I bet it would break their hearts. The burnt American flag to-date has not been displayed to the public. But the wall text has been written – with great enthusiasm.

Will the museum be showing the burnt American flag piece? Or is it reserved for their “programs,” as the museum’s curator of contemporary art mentioned on Instagram? It must be exciting for the underpaid “contracted” museum teachers (mostly women who are not given health insurance) to pull out this 8×10 burnt American flag painting mounted on a 4-ply museum board and use it to inspire both young and old people at the “outside the museum walls” art-making spaces in federally funded housing projects.

The art-making spaces are funded by a local manufacturer of fiberglas insulation and roofing materials, Owens Corning, and the program is run by the Toledo Museum of Art. Since the museum no longer has their long-time Children’s Saturday classes that took place in the basement of the museum, in a school aptly named The Toledo Museum of Art School of Design, bringing together 2,500 children from all over the city of Toledo every Saturday during the school year, not to mention the many hundreds of adults it served during the week, and now the halls are empty, Adam Levine likes to boast that they have burst “outside their walls” with this new program that serves 18,000 people in housing developments within a 2-mile radius of the museum. Whether the residents want it or need it or like it or not. Everyone else in the city is out of luck because most of their efforts are funneled into the Lucas Metropolitan Housing Authority, the President and CEO of which, Joaquin Cintron Vega, happens to be a new museum board member, along with Brian Chambers, the CEO of Owens Corning who is also on the board, sitting pretty.

And speaking of Nigerian art, I wonder if the Toledo Museum of Art will be returning their looted Benin Bronze, or are they waiting out the storm, keeping it hidden while conscientious museums across the country are returning their looted art to Africa? Adam Levine must have figured that sooner or later the reports of returned looted art will be old news and used to wrap fish.

If we can only be patient, coming next year will be a show curated by the recently retired Toledo Museum Curator of European Art, Larry Nichols.

It was good timing that Larry Nichols retired right before the $59.7 million sale of the three French Impressionist paintings, two of which were sold to one buyer under suspicious circumstances. And now he’s back on a freelance basis, with a real show to help out the museum since they have not been able to come up with a good one on their own after hiring countless curators. (It’s not that they can’t, they just haven’t wanted to.) There will be a show with not just one, or two, or three, but four Caravaggios, and they will be conversing with the wanna-be Caravaggios in the museum’s collection. How exciting! Put it on your calendar — Jan. 20 – April 14, 2024. I can’t wait!

I’m glad the museum could give our venerable old art curator an outlet during his retirement. Somehow Larry Nichols managed to persuade four museums to trust the Toledo Museum of Art, to get the museums to loan to Toledo their valuable painting. What a lucky break after the Toledo Museum of Art reneged on their promise to loan our Cezanne Avenue at Chantilly to the Art Institute of Chicago for their major Cezanne exhibition, which opened two days before our museum sold at Sotheby’s our valuable Cezanne painting, The Glade to a secret buyer for $41.7 million, the same mysterious person also buying Henri Matisse’s Fleurs ou Fleurs devant un portrait for $15.3 million. (See page in the show’s catalog, Cezanne, that was printed right before the show.)

What was the hurry to sell our paintings? Was our collection used as a catalog by a collector who made an offer that had a time limit that made Adam Levine betray his commitment to the Art Institute of Chicago? How could Adam Levine have sold our Cezanne right out from under these circumstances and break a promise to an esteemed museum? It hurt the exhibition, it hurt the public, it hurt the historic record, it hurt our institution – it hurt everyone. It is his fiduciary duty to be a good steward and to honor the reputation and legacy of the museum.

The money from the sale of the French Impressionist paintings, the Cezanne and Matisse that came from the Libbey Endowment and the Renoir that came from Mrs. McKelvy’s French Impressionist collection, should have been spent immediately on art, or else it should have gone back in the respective endowments. But instead they started an entirely new financial instrument with the proceeds of the art, making a lot of money for the bankers.

I wonder what the $2 million per year increase in the museum’s annual budget is going toward? They hired two people to be in charge of “People” and “Belonging” (a Chief People Officer and the other is the Director of Belonging.) The shows, as noted above, have been bare minimal offerings. They’ve reduced their public education to a skeletal existence. They closed the museum on Tuesday as well as Monday (except for MLK Day, a new tradition), so it is now only open five days a week. They raised their parking fee by 45%, right after they sold the museum’s three famous French Impressionist paintings. There are huge gaps in acquisition numbers for the art acquired in 2022, keeping the public from finding out what they are buying. This, after they made such a big deal about what they were going to buy. As it is a public institution formed to exhibit art to the public – the public has a right to know.

Why did the museum hire a curator of ancient art, Carlos Picon, the director of the Colnaghi art gallery in New York, who is an ancient art dealer? Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Do the objects being bought now really speak to the museum’s so-called mission of collecting art that looks like us and are they filling in cultural gaps and expanding the narrative of art history? Or is it the same old fluffy stuff?

Adam Levine said in his 2022 Forbes interview for a feature story on beauty without bias, “The superpower that an art museum has is when something goes up on the wall, it’s considered good. We set the cannon.” They’ve got the power, and they can do whatever they want with it.

In June 2021, the museum announced that a new gallery was being renovated that would be exclusively for solo shows of local artists. Then there was dead silence about it. It never materialized. After a year and no gallery, the donor himself, Bob Savage, told me that it was delayed because the museum couldn’t decide what to do. That’s how much they regard the local artist community, as if we do not “belong” or fit into their community/people/belonging plan. Then last week, on February 23, very quietly, Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District Invitational Art Competition high school art show opened the new gallery. No announcement of the gallery or the event was made to the public or to the artists of Toledo, but Ohio Congressman Marcy Kaptur, Representative of the Ninth Congressional District, was at the high school area art event named after her district thanking donors Sue and Bob Savage. So much for local adult artists as politics takes center stage at Adam Levine’s Toledo Museum of Art.

I remember writing to the museum board two years ago when their five-year plan was published in The Blade (see the first Blade article on this post). I wrote in response to the renewed community focus, and could they please bring back our 100-year old Toledo Area Artists Exhibition? The response was favorable and and Randy Oostra, the CEO arranged for me to have a meeting with Adam Levine, which took place two months later. That day, ready to give my spiel, Adam Levine surprised me with news that he said I would be the first outside of the museum to know – that they were renovating a gallery specifically for solo shows for local artists. One month later The Blade featured a news story (see above) a with a photo of Adam Levine, the donors that will pay for the renovation, and the mayor of Toledo. Then not a word was ever spoken or written about it, not on their website nor in social media, nor in their members magazine, then one mention, occurring in The Blade one year later in regard to the art making spaces in the federal housing projects, that those new art-makers may have a show at the museum gallery. Finally, nearly two years later, the gallery that was promised to professional local artists opened with a show for high school students. I feel sorry for those young artists because when they grow up, they will get no support from the museum, unless they live in the projects.

When the museum talks about community, local artists are not included. The art museum makes their own artists now.

We must trust them and believe they have our best interests at heart, Leslie Adams assured us in 2014. The former president of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies got a one-person show from the museum in 2013 as the first, and as it turned out, the only, biennial solo show prize winner ever. Other TFAS former presidents and museum insiders were also rewarded when the museum corruptly abruptly canceled our prestigious Toledo Area Artists Exhibition that we had had for nearly 100 years.

It is a tragedy for the community that the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition was ended. For nearly a century, it helped countless artists achieve their goals, including three generations of my family. Check out the significance of the show by looking at the bios, clippings and obituaries of the many historic Artists of Toledo on this website. The shows played a prominent role in the careers of nearly every successful artist in Toledo. The demise of this annual show hurts our very DNA.

Brian P. Kennedy, director from 2011 to 2019, is oddly honored. The Mellon Fellow title has been renamed to “Brian P. Kennedy Leadership Fellow.” It’s too bad that one of the first two Mellon Fellows hired by Kennedy (Halona Norton-Westbrook) was involved in the corruption of the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition in 2014. It gave the Mellon Fellowship a bad name. But with the new name, what kind of role model for leadership is Brian Kennedy after he resigned from the Toledo museum just 18 months before the end of his 10-year contract to go to the Peabody Essex Museum, then he quit that museum after only 17 months? Of his leaving the PEM, Kennedy said:

After thirty years in museum leadership on three continents, this current unprecedented period of racial, social, economic and political turmoil has given cause for serious thinking and new perspectives on the profound changes that are happening in our world and I have decided to pursue a new challenge.

Which is extremely weird.

His departure caused a great deal of damage to the Toledo Museum of Art in 2019, because the museum was not prepared with an heir apparent. It led to the unfortunate situation we are in today. The board members ended up hiring the museum’s other Mellon Fellow hired by Kennedy – Adam Levine – who had left Toledo, but then came back for this. But after just a couple of years and this track record, what is going on?

The museum has traded connoisseurship for money and politics. Art can be political, but a public art museum cannot be, because that would be divisive and polarizing. The Toledo Museum of Art was built on the principle of community.

In summary, our museum was built with wide open doors inviting everybody to walk through them. Before it was reduced to a bare minimum, the museum had the best educational system of any museum in the country, serving every person in the entire city who had a desire to learn about art. It was the hub of a robust local artist community that for many years had monthly local shows, and for 95 years had the prestigious annual juried show for local and regional artists. Not to mention the great art collection.

The art collected by the museum was chosen by art connoisseurs for its quality and encyclopedic representation of the world, as opposed to now, where it is chosen to serve a political agenda or fill a quota. From early-on and throughout the past century, our museum had been highly respected and drew great leaders such as Otto Wittmann and Adam Weinberg. The museum always had many shows going on at once and events of public interest. They published newsletters, catalogs and magazines keeping the public informed of all their goings on.

The museum’s mission was to educate and exhibit art to the public.

Today the mission seems quite vapid. That is, to get other museums to notice us and want to be like us. “THE MUSEUM SEEKS TO BECOME THE MODEL ART MUSEUM IN THE UNITED STATES FOR ITS COMMITMENT TO QUALITY AND ITS CULTURE OF BELONGING.” Yet how do we look to other museums when promises are broken? It is hypocritical to appear so “woke” while holding on to a Benin bronze looted art, not exhibiting it, not sending it back to Nigeria, and not a word about it one way or another. Their mission statement reveals their emptiness and hypocrisy, just like their new ad slogan “Art brings Toledo together,” when it’s doing quite the opposite.

The museum should be serving all the people who live here. Local artists matter. Our museum should not be used as a social experiment or as a stepping stone for the director’s next career move. But then it all seems like a smokescreen while they sell our valuable and beloved paintings, and who is profiting from that? Just look at everything that is at stake – artwork that is worth billions collected over 120 years.

With their two million dollar increase in the annual budget for the past two years, they have so much less to show for it.

It’s OUR museum. Where is the oversight?

Who gave them the right to take away the fundamental qualities of our museum, sell our art, demean our founders, kill our local traditions, invade our museum, live off our stellar reputation like blood-sucking vampires, and take our museum in a new direction all their own? Who are these people?

Tags 2014, Adam Levine, Brian Chambers, Brian Kennedy, Carlos Picón, Erin Corrales-Diaz, Halona Norton-Westbrook, Joaquin Cintron Vega, Kerry James Marshall, Leslie Adams, looted art, Otto Wittmann, Owens Corning, Robert Savage, The Blade, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Federation of Art Societies, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design

Artists of Toledo

Marcy Kaptur, politics and art museums

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date January 10, 2023

Cezanne's Avenue at Chantilly decorates the Lucas County Glass City Convention Center, 2023

Marcy Kaptur is right. This country is run by wealthy people on the East Coast and West Coast, and they don’t relate to the vast working-class people of the Midwest. Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, who holds the record for being the longest-serving woman in Congressional history, said the floor of Congress had always been lively with debates on the issues, but now it’s just a theater playing to the media.

You might think Ms. Kaptur was talking about the Toledo Museum of Art.

The 2022 Burns Halperin Report

The 2022 Burns Halperin Report is a survey which illustrates an extreme lack of diversity among 31 American museums, specifically, art made by Black Americans and women. The Toledo Museum participated in the survey. The survey mentioned only a couple of East Coast and West Coast museums doing a good job adding diversity to their new collections. Although the Toledo Museum of Art has a good record, it was not mentioned.

The Artists of Toledo Report

The Artists of Toledo Report is a survey of the artists whose art was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art between 2017 and 2022. The survey shows that the Toledo Museum of Art has been almost completely balanced regarding the diversity of the artists whose work was collected during the past six years, except for a 30% imbalance between non-American women and non-American men.

Just passing through…

Mr. Levine has laid out a road map for the museum to become what he calls the “model museum in the United States,” one whose collection reflects the demographic makeup of the country, and where people feel “a sense of comfort and psychological safety in every interaction with the institution’s brand on-site and off-site,” as he put it. Itʼs About Time.ʼ Museums Make Bids for Their Communities. New York Times, May 21, 2021

The Toledo Museum has never had to try so hard to be a “model museum,” the museum has democratically served the entire community since 1901. However, certain new museum directors passing through on their upwardly mobile path in the museum world have stripped our museum of its democracy. The current director, Adam Levine, is from New York. He plays to the East Coast and West Coast media with disingenuous rhetoric, seeking publicity by exploiting the diversity issue.

Never mind that the museum’s revered public art education program and local artist shows that went on for nearly 100 years have been eliminated.

The Big Middle

The Toledo Museum of Art is in Marcy Kaptur’s district. Like Marcy Kaptur, the museum has a solid progressive democratic foundation that serves the working-class. The Toledo Museum of Art used to have a formidable public art education program. It had a local artist exhibition tradition unlike any other museum in the country. The educational program and the local art shows served multiple generations of Toledoans. These are the roots of the museum, through which the collecting of diverse art has evolved naturally.

A diverse crowd in front of the Toledo art museum, 1919.

Frederick Douglass Allen, born in 1886, is the earliest recognized black artist in Toledo. He was one of the first students of the museum’s public art classes. He showed in the first annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, and seven subsequent annual shows at the Toledo Museum of Art. I spoke to the Warren AME Church, where Frederick Douglass Allen was a member, about any history they knew of blacks and the Toledo artist community. I learned that the early black community had more urgent priorities to deal with when they migrated to Toledo, so the artist Frederick Douglass Allen was ahead of his time.

As for women, Nina Spalding Stevens, wife of the 1903–1926 museum director, George W. Stevens, served as the associate director of the museum. She also created the educational program. If there has ever been a bias against blacks and women at the museum, it would be difficult to find. The art classes and shows provided a level playing field for a diverse community of artists. Many scholarship recipients were blacks and women. The local solo shows have always been diverse. In the 1970’s the museum hosted two group shows for the “Black Artists of Toledo.”

In the 1990’s, with the first black Trustee appointed to the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors, an initiative was begun to add more diversity to the collection. To understand the museum’s collection of “diverse art,” one must first understand that “diverse art” is made by contemporary artists, and the Toledo Museum of Art barely collected contemporary art until the 1960’s. Today the museum board itself is quite diverse, with a track record for adding diversity to the museum’s acquisitions.

Beauty without bias

“The superpower that an art museum has is when something goes up on the wall, it’s considered good. We set the cannon.” Adam Levine quoted in Forbes, ‘Beauty Without Bias’ At The Toledo Museum Of Art, Feb. 28, 2022

In his arrogance, Adam Levine claims that museums are in the unique position to put anything on their walls and call it art, and because it’s in a museum it is considered good. How odd for the Toledo Museum director to suggest that collecting art at our fine museum could be turned into a political anthropology experiment. The connoisseurship of our curators is what has grown our collection. Our museum is about great art — not politics. It’s about skilled curation, and then letting people decide for themselves what they like. That Adam Levine brought in a Branding Department to redefine our museum, after ripping out the democratic soul of the local community from the museum, using diversity to attract the attention of other museums (and grant foundations), is such a conceit. How ironic that, with such a record for collecting diverse art in the past six years, our museum didn’t get even as much as a peep in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report. But then we are in the Big Middle, and nothing can take the museum out of it, so Adam Levine might as well be content with making our museum functional again for our own large Midwest community, as unexciting for him as that might be.

Our famous French Impressionist paintings thrown out the door.

Cannibalizing our museum

The biggest hoax on the community was Adam Levine selling our historic French Impressionist paintings while quoting Edward Drummond Libbey, “let the multitudinous array of the mediocre be relegated to the past and in its place be found the highest quality, the best examples and the recognition of only those thoughts which will stand for all time,” as if Libbey would approve of the selling of our major Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir paintings. Adam Levine claimed that the sale was for “diversity,” when over the past six years, the museum has meticulously added an equitable ratio of Black Americans to Women to Other American artists acquired by the museum. He lied about data. He betrayed a peer museum in Chicago by reneging on a loan of our Cezanne painting for their show. He lied about the quality of the paintings being sold, and the intentions of the museum. Two paintings were sold to the same buyer for $59 million! Eight months later the Toledo Museum of Art does not have one artwork purchased with that money to show for it.

Impressionism speaking for our community

It is sad to see the museum’s French Impressionist paintings commercialized at the brand-new Lucas County Glass City Convention Center — including our only remaining Cezanne, Avenue at Chantilly, which is featured as anonymous wallpaper framing a multi-level staircase. This is the painting that was promised to the Chicago Cezanne Exhibition. Obviously, the museum and the Lucas County government believe that Impressionism speaks for our community. They are also using an uncredited Van Gogh for their two-story escalator alcove and a uncredited Monet on a large vinyl mural to decorate the second floor hallway. According to The Blade’s news story on the new Public Art, the convention center is “showcasing the museum’s collection.” Yet just eight months ago, the museum sold three original paintings from their small and valuable Impressionist collection that people came from near and far to see. That Adam Levine chose these paintings for the convention center, out of 30,000 possible choices, right after the unpopular and controversial deaccession of the Impressionist paintings, shows a frightening lack of honesty, integrity, vision, sensitivity and leadership.

Pass the remote, please

Recently, a new communications manager was hired at the museum who lives in Lansing Michigan. Her message to the people of Toledo was that Toledoans want to see themselves on the walls. The irony of an out-of-towner telling Toledoans what they want to see at the museum! The museum has a new department — Branding — and the director of the Branding department lives in Colorado. The Curator of Antiquities, Carlos Picon, is an art dealer in New York. (no kidding!) The African Art Curator, Lanisa Kitchiner, is the Chief of African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Why is our museum director turning the controls over to the East Coast and the West?

We can be thankful to Marcy Kaptur for working so devotedly for our Midwest community for the past 41 years. We are extremely lucky to have her fighting for us in Congress for all these decades. The Toledo Museum of Art has had seven directors during those 41 years. (If only we could have cloned Otto Wittmann, the museum’s fourth director, who grew the museum for 30 years.)

Marcy Kaptur is the real deal. With Marcy Kaptur, as with the Toledo Museum of Art, you won’t know what you are missing until it is gone.

Another “real deal” is Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, mayor of Toledo 1897-1904, whose house stood where the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle stands today, and who inspired Marcy Kaptur so much that she wrote her college thesis on him. See my post from 2021 to put into perspective the progressive beginnings and democratic legacy of the Toledo Museum of Art: Whitlock, Jones and June Boyd

Tags 2022 Burns Halperin Report, Adam Levine, Carlos Picón, Lanisa Kitchiner, Marcy Kaptur, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design

Artists of Toledo

The Artists of Toledo Report

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date December 19, 2022

Remember when The Toledo Museum of Art sold our three famous French Impressionist paintings for 59 million dollars – Adam Levine claiming it was to buy diverse art, because their data showed a lack of diversity? “A collections audit indicated the greatest imbalances exist across gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, nationality and geography, and material/medium.” Remember when Adam Levine told us that the museum never meant to have multiple works by any one artist, and that our Cezanne, Renoir and Matisse paintings were no good? Quoting Edward Drummond Libbey, he said, “Let the multitudinous array of the mediocre be relegated to the past and in its place be found the highest quality, the best examples and the recognition of only those thoughts which will stand for all time.”

see blog posts:

Covering the director’s memo mistake

Open letter to the Toledo Museum of Art Trustees

Edward and Florence’s Wills

Toledo’s broken promise to the Cezanne Exhibition in Chicago

I thought it was BS then, but last week it really hit home, when the 2022 Burns Halperin Report was published, which highlighted an extreme lack of diversity among museums as a result of a survey of 31 American art museums. The Toledo Museum of Art was one of them.

The stats revealed by the 2022 Burns Halperin Report were stunning and shocking, but it just didn’t ring true in regard to our museum, so over the weekend, I did my own little survey, with data that I collected from the Toledo Museum of Art’s public online collections database.

The purpose of my survey is to compare our percentages to the percentages of the survey of the Burns Halperin Report, because The Toledo Museum of Art took part in the survey as one of the 31 American art museums whose art acquisition data was examined.

The Artists of Toledo Report:

A breakdown of the race and sex and nationality of the artists whose works were acquired by The Toledo Museum of Art during the years 2017–2022 in the categories of painting, photography, ceramics, glass, sculpture, prints, drawings, metals and textiles, a total of 204 artists.

The Artists of Toledo Report Findings:

37.5% Women 62.5% Men
57% American 43% Rest of World
28% American Women 30% American Men
14% Black American 4% Native American 40% Other Americans

For comparison, the 2022 Burns Halperin Report:

These are the basic differences between the methodology of the 2022 Burns Halperin Report and the Artists of Toledo Report:

The Burns Halperin Report surveyed each of the 339,969 works acquired by 31 museums from 2008 to 2020, whereas, for simplicity, I surveyed the 204 artists themselves who had work acquired between 2017 through 2022, at only one of the surveyed museums – The Toledo Museum of Art.

The Toledo Museum of Art added one or more works made by the 204 artists between 2017 and 2022. I counted the artists, I did not count the number of works added. (Perhaps there were 300 to 500 works, as there were multiple works from some of the 204 artists. It is easily verified on the online database and in museum annual reports. I thought it was the artists themselves who were important for my report.)

The 2022 Burns Halperin Report differentiated Black Americans from all artists.

I differentiated Americans from the Rest of World artists and compared Black Americans to the out-group “Other Americans” (Caucasian, Japanese-American, Chinese-American, Vietnamese-American, Iraqi American, etc.) I added Native Americans in consideration of this under-represented group that is doing better. Not having a breakdown for rest of the world group, for which Toledo consisted of 43% of all artists, may have skewed the perceived U.S. population race ratios of the Burns Halperin Report, but even so, how different the two reports look! Black Americans compared to Other Americans appear to be well-represented at the Toledo Museum of Art, where it is gender equity that appears to be needed the most.

The fact is, The Toledo Museum of Art is racially diverse,
but lacks gender equity.

The Toledo Museum of Art still has nothing to show for the sale of our Matisse, Renoir and Cezanne paintings. What happened to that money, and what financial institutions are profiting from it? That money should have gone back into the Libbey Endowment to be used for art. What deals were made to motivate our museum to renege on Toledo’s commitment to the Cezanne Exhibition in Chicago, that made Adam Levine sell our Cezanne the very week of the opening of the Cezanne show? Our painting was supposed to be in that show – it appears full-page in the Exhibition catalog! Our museum, seven months later, has added no new artwork with the proceeds of that urgent sale.

So many lies to the community. The Toledo Museum of Art took advantage of the politics, and pulled the wool over the people who live in Toledo. Not cool.

The rise and fall of a once-great museum

As for women, the museum has hurt the women of the community by taking away the two things that gave women equality – adult art classes and local artist shows at the museum. There is no disconnect between “local art” and “museum art” — I found that one artist of Toledo (Jack Schmidt) and one artist from Toledo (Joseph Kosuth) had been collected by the museum during the past six years. They are both men, but if we were to go back a few years, we would find Toledo women among the Toledo Museum of Art’s new acquisitions. Among them are Edith Franklin and Leslie Adams, both with multiple works in the museum’s collection.

Each one of these Toledo artists owes their beginnings to the late, great programs of the Toledo Museum of Art. Jack Schmidt, glass artist, was born in Toledo and learned his craft from Dominick Labino. If it had not been for the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design, there would not have been the historic Studio Glass Workshop in 1962, during which Dominick Labino formulated a way for individual artists to work in glass. Imagine that. Today, glass is the largest category of art collected by the museum, complete with its own world-class building.

Edith Franklin, born 100 years ago, who I wrote about this month, is a prime example of an artist who benefited from the museum’s classes (from age 10 to age 65) and the vibrant local art shows the museum has since done away with. But at least we have Edith’s work in the museum to remember that by.

Leslie Adams is also a product of the museum classes and local art shows. She was in multiple Toledo Area Artist Exhibitions before they were eliminated, culminating in her own one-person show at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2013.

Joseph Kosuth benefited from the museum’s free Saturday children’s art classes. Then, after studying at the Cleveland Institute College of Art, he left Ohio and never came back. His work has been acquired by top museums including the the Museum of Modern Art very early-on in his career. The Toledo Museum is lucky to finally own two works by Joseph Kosuth, acquired in 2018 and 2019.

I myself have benefited greatly by being able to take the museum classes, which I took from age 10 through my third year of college. I went on to have a successful photography career in New York. I have work in the Chicago Institute of Art and other museums. I helped Adam Weinberg (who is now director of the Whitney Museum of American Art) set up the first photography darkroom underneath the Peristyle when he was a Fellow at the Toledo Museum in the late 1970’s, and I was the first photography teacher of the free Saturday museum classes in 1979. Without the educational opportunities I had at the museum, I know my life would have been profoundly different.

Perhaps it was the democratic enrichments that the museum gave to the community in the past that have made the Artists of Toledo pie chart look more balanced than the Burns Halperin Report. So, most museums are not like the Toledo Museum of Art? We knew that. But it is odd now, that the Toledo museum has inwardly stripped the community of these great resources, while outwardly, striving for diversity as a “brand.” Fairness came so naturally to the Toledo Museum of Art in the past. But now, with the school gone, and the shows gone, within that vacuum they have hired a large staff to oversee diversity. I can only assume there must be a lot of grant money for that.

The Toledo Museum of Art was apparently a very unique museum. It did indeed have such a great reputation that in 1946, it attracted the great Otto Wittmann, who came to Toledo and became its director because it had such a great education department and community involvement. He grew the museum’s collection for 30 years, all that time with the classes and the local art shows going strong.

The Toledo Museum of Art should bring back classes for adults and children and reinstate the local artist shows. This would help with gender equity, both within the Toledo community and within the larger world. It would help artists in our community reach their potential, if anyone cares.

Proposal to hire art teachers at the Toledo Museum of Art

Tags 2022 Burns Halperin Report, Adam Levine, Adam Weinberg, Edith Franklin, Leslie Adams, Owens Corning, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design

Artists of Toledo

Proposal to hire art teachers at the Toledo Museum of Art

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date December 9, 2022

Nearly all cities of any size in the country have their museums and galleries, which are fast becoming a necessity….We owe it to ourselves, to the school children of Toledo, and to the future generations to see that our good work shall continue, that we lay a foundation so solid and so complete that the future citizens of Toledo will look back upon this, our pioneer work, with praise and appreciation. — Edward Drummond Libbey. First annual report of The Toledo Museum of Art.

We’d like to have adult and children’s art classes back.
I hope this proposal helps.

Hire four teachers full-time. They teach one or two adult art classes four days a week at the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design. The adult classes are ceramics, metals, painting, printmaking, and life drawing. In the afternoons, the teachers go out in the field to the assigned remote art stations that the museum has set up for Owens Corning and Promedica in the federally funded housing projects for the “Art Out of School” program, part of the DEAI plan. The teachers have Monday off, but work a full day on Saturday for the Free Children’s Saturday Classes that the museum brings back.

The salary for the teachers would start out at $52,000, plus the full package of benefits that the museum administrators and special employees receive — 25 Days of Paid Time Off Annually, Birthday Paid Day Off, Medical, Dental, & Vision Insurance, 403b Retirement Savings Plan, Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability, Term Life and AD&D Insurance Plans (especially important for teachers working in the field), Paid Parental Leave, Pet Insurance, Employee Assistance Plan, Museum Family Membership, Employee Discounts in the Museum Store, Café, Studio Art Classes, & of course the unspoken preferential opportunities for exhibiting their own art at the museum.

All recipients of museum fellowships are required to teach a class. Just one class that includes the entire community’s involvement, since the museum strives to include the community. Which is exactly how it was done before the original Toledo Museum of Art School of Design classes were eliminated. If it was good enough for Adam Weinberg, who is now the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who in the late 1970’s was a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow at the Toledo Museum of Art, and who set up the children’s photo classes, it’s good enough for the Toledo Museum of Art fellowship grant recipients today.

Perhaps the full cost would be $500,000 annually to administer, considering the extra guards and maintenance workers needed, to augment the modest tuition that could be charged.

The restored Toledo Museum of Art School of Design would be supported by Owens Corning, Promedica, Key Bank, The Andersons, Fifth Third Bank, Dana Corporation, Libbey Glass, Hickory Farms, Mercy Health, Ernst & Young, Toledo Trust, Buckeye CableSystem, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, The Greater Toledo Community Foundation, as well as the Libbey Endowment and other endowment funds.

It would be a way for the troubled Toledo Museum of Art to get back to its roots, to recapture our culture, and give back to the community. The museum has always been inclusive and fair to everyone – it should not discriminate against anyone today. It should spend its money on education that is fair for everyone, and stop spending money on relentless data-analyzing and profiling our community.

It doesn’t make Owens Corning and Promedica look good, who are the benefactors of the Art Out of School program, when the teachers are expected to work freelance, at near minimum wage, without benefits, outside the museum walls in federally funded housing projects. The teachers are expected to work for practically nothing. They are expected to put their lives at risk, while the other museum employees get all sorts of benefits and are surrounded by museum guards. Restoring the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design would take care of that, and make it fair for everyone.

A crowd of people in front of the Toledo Museum of Art in November 1919: looks like inclusion to me. We never had a problem before, but now we have to put two highly paid administrators in charge of diversity and create two or three or four new departments — when all that money would go a long way hiring teachers and restoring the School of Design. Is this the result of Adam Levine’s infamous George Floyd memo mistake? The board should have fired him then. Talk about smoke and mirrors and diversion, while our masterpieces are being sold out from under us under suspicious circumstances.

“Art Out of School brings world-class programming from the Toledo Museum of Art to people in surrounding areas. Programs such as this align with Owens Corning Foundation’s aim to empower people in the community,” said Don Rettig, president of the Owens Corning Foundation.

That’s wonderful to help this small community, but not at the disenfranchisement of rest of the community. Children and adults outside of this very specific group of people are not included. What is worse is that the public art programs that formed the fiber of our large, democratic community have been eliminated, such as the free children’s Saturday classes that were for children from all walks of life, along with a robust adult art class program, and the very special century-old May Show that brought together the entire Toledo area art community, a local art show encompassing 17 counties.

The museum’s way of inclusion in 2022 is to alienate their beloved larger community by selling famous French Impressionist paintings, as if subtracting great art makes them more diverse. They do this after greatly reducing classes and killing the community art shows (which fairly represented women and men.) Then they raise the museum parking fee by over 40%, and this is to help with inclusion?

The museum is erasing the past and rewriting history. The public is supposed to believe that the Toledo Museum of Art has not been fair to minorities. Two highly paid administrators are hired to oversee the issue. Their focus is on racial equity, not gender equity. Yet the female half of the population has been marginalized by the art world, and most recently and quite vividly by the Toledo Museum of Art with the elimination of classes and shows that offered women fair and equal opportunities. Amidst the museum’s hypocrisy, countless Museum Fellows are added to the “diversity” mission. A new “Branding” department is created with an extensive P.R. staff, fully employed with extensive benefits. They focus their education efforts on a small minority in public housing projects and expect teachers (mostly women) to work freelance without health insurance! This is how the museum “helps” the community instead of buying art and reinstating its legacy art education program for the benefit of the entire community.

Our progressive founders, Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey, would want their money back.

The following are pages from the Toledo Museum of Art’s archives regarding the museum’s free children’s Saturday art classes that benefited 2,500 children every Saturday during the school year for nearly a century:

Tags Adam Levine, Adam Weinberg, Owens Corning, Promedica, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design

Artists of Toledo

Looting and the Toledo Museum of Art

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date October 7, 2022

Toledo Museum’s new culture of belonging does not mean they can keep looted belongings of another culture.

Photo and description from the book published in 1900, Antique Works of Art from Benin Collected By Lieutenant- General Pitt Rivers, D.C.L., F.R.S., F.S.A. Inspector of Ancient Monuments in Great Britain, &c. page 34. “Figs. 100 and 101. – Bronze cast of human head. Marked negro features, rudely formed. Three tribal marks over each eye. Peculiar pointed reticulated head-dress of coral or agate. Curious lines of incised circles above and below the eyes. Coral choker, badge of rank. Bands of coral or agate hanging down on both sides and at the back. Ears badly formed. The projecting base ornamented with a guilloche pattern of two bands with pellets.” See, Yale Library webpage here..

For a museum that vies to be a forward-thinking museum desiring to set an example for all other museums to follow, why hasn’t the Toledo Museum of Art returned the stolen Benin Bronze to Nigeria yet? It was stolen in 1897, so they’ve had plenty of time! If they want to set the example then they’ve missed the boat, since Benin Bronzes are already being returned by U.S. museums, including the Smithsonian, The Met and Boston.

It was stolen by British colonial troops who invaded Benin City in 1897. It was then sold to General Pitt Rivers, a collector, who started a museum with his new collection of looted art.

For an overview on looted art, see Hyperallergic’s October 4, 2022 story, John Oliver Roasts Western Museums in Episode on Looted Art regarding “subjects like hesitant repatriation, antiquities looting, and the shady acquisition practices of auction … citing grisly colonial histories and contemporary looting schemes.” View the highly entertaining youtube link where you can watch the entire 30-minute episode here.

A page from the Toledo Museum of Art publication – African Tribal Art, 1973, which commemorated the museum’s recently opened gallery, the Art of Africa. While the museum had owned examples of African art for 15 years, it had only then, in 1973, acquired enough to form a gallery solely devoted to the art of the vast continent. The Benin Bronze was one of the first African objects it acquired, in 1958.

The African Image, Toledo Museum of Art’s 1959 show of African Art, put together from the collections of 37 museums and private collectors.

Toledo’s Benin Bronze came from the Pitt-Rivers Museum in 1958, right before the museum closed. This museum was General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-River’s personal museum at Farnham, Dorset, England bearing the same name as the museum started at Oxford University with his earlier bequeathed collection.

Toledo’s Benin Bronze was featured in multiple African Art catalogs published by the Toledo museum in 1959, 1973 and 1998. But it’s not on display. Why not? Is it because it is so shameful to have this object, but Adam Levine can’t “pull the trigger” (as he so colorfully described his divestment of the museum’s three great French Impressionist paintings last spring for $54 million) to shoot this object back to Africa?

The Benin Bronze featured in the Toledo museum’s catalog, Facing Africa: The African Art Collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, published in 1998.

With Lanisa Kitchiner as the Toledo Museum of Art’s African art consulting curator, who also works full-time for the Smithsonian, an institution that is sending theirs back, it seems odd that Toledo’s Benin Bronze is in limbo — it’s not on display, but it’s not on a plane going back.

Toledo Museum of Art website catalog details, 2022. Not on display.

The museum says one thing but does another.

Just this summer, in the Blade’s 7-26-22 Toledo Museum of Art helps bring stolen antiquities back to owners, in regard to four objects looted from Italy in the museum’s collection, the museum told us that “the process of sending artwork to its home country and leaving the museum’s collection, or repatriation and deaccessioning, is integral to what the museum stands for.”

“The museum has a long history of helping in repatriation processes like these, including an Etruscan water jug caught up in an international trafficking scheme that was returned to Italian authorities in 2013 and a scientific instrument called an astrolabium, determined to have been stolen from Germany during World War II, that was returned to the German government in 2015.”

Toledo Museum of Art’s looted Italian kalpis, 1982 – 2013. It is strange that the Toledo Museum curator of antiquities from about 1970 to 1995, Kurt Luckner, only 49 years old, died of a heart attack right after Giacomo Medici’s polaroids of stolen antiquities (including a 5th century B.C. water jug he bought for the museum in 1982) were discovered by the authorities in 1995.

The 2013 repatriation of the Italian water jug

The Etruscan water jug, or kalpis, was sold to the museum for $90,000 in 1982 by Gianfranco and Rosie Becchina, who got it from the infamous Giacomo Medici. You can read about Becchina and Medici in the book, Chasing Aphrodite, an exposé of the antiquity looting at The Getty written by the journalists who had reported on it for the L.A. Times. In fact, this book describes the finding of Medici’s polaroids in 1995, one of which shows this very kalpis still covered in dirt from a recent illicit excavation. It wasn’t until 2012, the day that USA v. One Etruscan Black-Figured Kalpis, circa 510-500 BC, case No. 3:12-cv-1582 appeared online, that the Toledo Museum decided to do what they “stand for,” and send the looted antiquity back to Italy.*

Denying any other looted art in the museum besides the Nereid Sweetmeat Stand which was stolen from the Dresden museum during World War II, bought by the Toledo museum in 1956, and returned to Dresden in 2011, Director Brian Kennedy questioned, should there be an end-date to repatriations? It was his second, but he would oversee a lot more between 2015 and 2019. One was another 1982 acquisition of an Italian drinking vessel obtained from the same looters of this kalpis, Becchina and Medici.*

About the Subhash Kapoor-looted Asian antiquities

The Ganesh, Toledo Museum of Art 2006 – 2014.

The Ganesh was stolen from the Sivan Temple in Tamil Nadu India in late 2005 or early 2006. It was then sold to Toledo Museum in 2006, who returned it to India in 2014, two years after the Manhattan antiquities dealer, Subhash Kapoor, who sold it to them, was extradited to India to await trial for illegally taking antiquities out of the country. Kapoor had also given 48 free objects that the Toledo Museum listed in their 2007-2008 Annual Report as being recent additions to their collection. In this same publication, the museum thanked Kapoor on the donor page for his donation valued at more than $100,000.

Yellow highlights show the Subhash Kapoor gifts to the museum, which the museum added to their collection. The museum would claim later that it had never added most of these in its collection. See, here. Hmm. The blue brackets point out two of the purchases, including the pictured vessel which was also featured in the 2009 Toledo Museum Masterworks book.

This Subhash Kapoor episode is well-documented on the blog, Chasing Aphrodite, which is written by one of the authors of the book of the same name, mentioned above. Quote from the blog:

The Toledo Museum of Art told the New York Times that it had received a gift of 44 terracotta antiquities from Kapoor in 2007. The only object that appears in a search of the museum’s online collection is a terracotta vessel purchased in 2008. The museum published the object in 2009 in a book of the museum’s masterworks, but offers no ownership history other than saying it was created in Chandraketugarh, an archaeological site north-east of Kolkata. Where was it before Toledo? What are the ownership histories for the other 43 objects acquired from Kapoor? –– Chasing Aphrodite

The museum replied to Chasing Aphrodite’s July 2013 inquiry with this:

“Our policy is to respond to requests about objects in the TMA collections made by official authorities such as museums, law enforcement agencies, foreign governments and those making legal claims to ownership,” spokeswoman Kelly Garrow** told me. “There have been no such inquiries to date in regard to the objects referred to in your email.” In other words, in Toledo’s view the public has no right to know the ownership history of objects in the museum’s collection, even when serious legal questions have been raised.

The museum came clean about their dealings with Kapoor in March 2014, attributing their decision to the information given to them by Chasing Aphrodite, even though the museum stonewalled their inquiries for two years and told them that they don’t have to answer to the public.

Subhash Kapoor gave a lot of free gifts to various museums, including The Met. The Met has several of these freebies listed as 20th Century. They are replicas – fakes. Kapoor would smuggle into the U.S. the real stuff packed in boxes of replicas, and the boxes would be marked, “replicas.” [see this Paul Barford blog link for that detail.]

The true meaning of Belonging

And now we have a young new museum director with a major in anthropology, art history, and mathematics and social sciences, who did his graduate work at Oxford University – home of the Pitt Rivers Museum, albeit the first Pitt Rivers, which itself houses 327 Benin Bronzes according to Wikipedia. Our director, Adam Levine, seems to want to “contribute to the eradication of the illicit market for ancient artifacts.” He wants all museums in America to follow his good example. He’s leading a “Belonging” campaign where he endeavors to make the museum more welcoming by displaying a specially balanced world history in order that everyone will see themselves in the galleries. But this important Benin Bronze historical sculpture from Africa is not being shown in any gallery. Nor has it been returned to Nigeria. And not a peep about it.

The museum’s Belonging Plan states, “it is important to acknowledge the prior inhabitants of the land on which the Museum stands” and “The Toledo Museum of Art created a Land Acknowledgment both to honor the Indigenous peoples who resided on the land before the founding of the physical campus in the early 1900s and to demonstrate support for Indigenous communities of Ohio, celebrate their cultures, and recognize their forced removal from their lands in previous centuries.”

The hypocrites!

Since the sculpture was stolen by English colonialists in arguably the earliest episode of modern-day looting, in 1897, an ambush that captured an entire cultural heritage in artwork, shouldn’t the Toledo Museum of Art be returning this object as fast as they can – (they sure could sell three French Impressionist paintings at lightning speed) – considering the new branding and what the new 2022 Toledo Museum stands for, and to meet the museum’s goals for being totally authentic by 2026.

The Toledo Museum needs to do a survey of all of its works of art and research to find out if any had been purchased from looters or money launderers of stolen artwork, and they need to put online a database of the entire provenance of each work for the public to freely access. They need to do it with the same determination that they gave to the recent audit of their artworks, which showed that “the greatest imbalances exist across gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, nationality and geography, and material/medium.”

The museum should rethink that recent survey – what is the relevance of any of that, and specifically, of the nationality and geography of an object, when so much of that relies on an illicit market, when the museum should not be stealing from other cultures. The museum is, after all, into belonging, and Nigeria should own back their heritage that was stolen by the English colonialists, because it rightly belongs to them.

And while they are at it, the Toledo Museum of Art should stop looting the local Toledo community of its cultural traditions. They should reinstate the museum’s long tradition of children’s Saturday art classes that had always been for ANY and ALL children in Toledo (2,500 children every week), instead of just a discriminatory few children (25 at the most?) at a specific grant-written outreach after-school childcare program at a library. Return to our Toledo community the century-old Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, that the museum stole from us in 2014 under a cloud of corruption, and give us that Robert and Sue Savage Community Gallery for local artists promised to us in June 2021. The Toledo Museum of Art got Robert and Sue Savage to donate a lot of money to renovate a gallery space for one-person local artist shows 17 months ago, so where is it?

*Museum Ethics and the Toledo Museum of Art, Christos Tsirogiannis, artcrimeresearch.org Christos Tsirogiannis is a forensic archaeologist who wrote about the kalpis and brought to light the looted Hephaistos drinking vessel in 2017, which the museum did not deal with until 2019.

**Regarding Kelly Garrow, the museum’s former Director of Communications who wrote the 2013 email to Chasing Aphrodite saying that they owed no answers to the public in regard to looted art in their collection, see this interesting 2014 message to this very artistsoftoledo.com blog (scroll down to the comments), where she was inspired to write 10 paragraphs about how the museum did not “fix” the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition of 2014 to add their own employees, and more.

Tags 2014, Adam Levine, Brian Kennedy, Lanisa Kitchiner, looted art, The Blade, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art

Artists of Toledo

Toledo’s broken promise to the Cezanne Exhibition in Chicago

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date August 15, 2022

Cezanne Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago
May 15 – September 5, 2022

While the Toledo Museum of Art does nothing — there has been no Art Matters quarterly member magazine since January, no Robert and Sue Savage Community Gallery as promised to us in May 2021, no blockbuster shows in the Canaday or Levis exhibition galleries that mostly have been empty, except for a couple of uninteresting shows — the Art Institute of Chicago is having its third blockbuster exhibition since the pandemic began in 2020 — El Greco, Monet, and now the most important Cezanne retrospective in 16 years.

We saw it. It was great. It gave me a renewed understanding as to why Cezanne is called a painter’s painter, why he is considered the father of modern art, and why he is so highly regarded, even among the new generation of artists.

Wondering if the curators had asked to borrow one of our Cezannes for the show, we found the answer in the published catalog – a beautiful definitive book aptly titled Cezanne. There in the book on page 154, reproduced on a full page, was our Avenue at Chantilly, Catalog #83 listed for the Chicago show. On the acknowledgement page, among 70 other museums, the Toledo Museum of Art is thanked for making their work available for display in the exhibition.

But for the past several months since this show has been up, Avenue at Chantilly has been hanging in Gallery 35 at the Toledo Museum of Art, and not in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Cezanne Exhibition! Wondering if I had somehow missed our painting at the Chicago Cezanne show, I called the Toledo Museum of Art to check to see if it is on display in Toledo, and I was assured that it is indeed on display, in Gallery 35.

I wonder if the reason why it is not in Chicago is because the Toledo Museum of Art made an abrupt decision to deaccession our other Cezanne painting, The Glade, after the museum committed our only other Cezanne to the Chicago’s Cezanne retrospective. Weren’t we assured that deaccessioning was a thoughtful, long process? Apparently not in this case, as the book went to press in 2022 (or very late 2021, as the book was dedicated to one of the curators who died in November 2021. )

It seems that our museum felt so much guilt about their rash decision to deaccession the painting that they broke their commitment to their peer museum and pulled it from the exhibition after the book went to press. As Director Adam Levine informed Toledoans on April 8 when he announced the shocking deaccessions of not only their only other Cezanne painting, but of their other Matisse painting and a Renoir bather, the museum’s only other Cezanne painting and Renoir painting and Matisse painting would always be on display on the walls of the Toledo Museum of Art.

What would make the Toledo Museum of Art break a promise to important colleagues and peer institutions — the other museums in the United States that they so much want to make an impression on in their 5-year plan, to be a great example of a museum that all other museums would look towards as an example of how all museums should be?

Quotes from the Toledo Museum of Art’s 5-year plan —

The Toledo Museum of Art will become the model art museum in the United States for its commitment to quality and its culture of belonging.

By authentically connecting quality with belonging, TMA can become one of the museums in this country from which others learn.

TMA’s transformation will be heralded by the press and will set the bar for museum peers.

How does that make Toledo trustworthy or how can they ever expect to be a good example to other museums? Will other museums be willing to loan paintings to Toledo in the future after this, if Toledo ever has the wherewithal to put together a traveling show?

World-class exhibitions that speak to 21st century issues will draw Northwest Ohioans and out-of-towners alike, with tourists shocked and delighted to be welcomed by a diverse and empowered staff so clearly loving what they do and the institution they serve. TMA’s exhibitions will depart Toledo to traverse the globe, providing the Museum and its hometown the visibility it once enjoyed.

In Christopher Knight’s May 6, 2022 COMMENTARY: AN OHIO MUSEUM IS HOLDING THE BIGGEST SALE OF ARTWORK YET. IT’S UNCONSCIONABLE, he interviewed Director Adam Levine, who told him that market realities made the difference in pulling the trigger right now on the deaccession of the paintings. What would the market realities be, I wonder, that would make the Toledo Museum of Art renege on a commitment as important as lending Avenue at Chantilly to Chicago’s seminal exhibition on Cezanne?

Strangely, two of the paintings that were suddenly deaccessioned – the most valuable ones – were bought by the same buyer at the auction on May 17, as reported in Barron’s the evening of the auction. Could it be that there was a collector who told the museum they would buy the paintings, now or never, and the museum didn’t care about anyone – the public or their peers?

It is a gross thought that Toledo Museum of Art might be cannibalizing itself. They have tarnished their reputation among peers by reneging on a promise while lying to the public about the reason for the deaccessions. Edward Drummond Libbey did not advocate that the museum have only one example of a great artist’s paintings. The paintings were not “mediocre.” Adam Levine invoked a Libbey quote to support the sale: “Let the multitudinous array of the mediocre be relegated to the past and in its place be found the highest quality, the best examples and the recognition of only those thoughts which will stand for all time.”

That so-called mediocre painting brought $41.7 million at the auction proving its greatness. What’s more, our Toledo museum did not need the money! Chicago owns 9 Cezanne oil paintings, Detroit owns 5 Cezanne oil paintings, Cleveland owns 3 Cezanne oil paintings, now we own only 1, and that painting was supposed to have been in Chicago’s Cezanne Exhibition, but it wasn’t, after it was promised and after that promise was memorialized in a book. Our museum let down a national community from seeing it! The museum let Toledo down, because Toledoans would have felt proud to see our painting hanging in the show, but instead this makes us feel shame and embarrassment for living in Toledo.

Just another lie when Toledo gets credit in the book for being in the show.

Perhaps Adam Levine doesn’t mind breaking promises – he certainly doesn’t mind lying to us – when our museum still gets credit in an important Cezanne book for being in the show – why not pull it out of the show — it was too late to make corrections — the opportunity of selling our other Cezanne painting — was it to a demanding secret buyer who just couldn’t wait four months until the show was over, was that the “market reality” that was just too good to pass up? One can only speculate, but an investigation needs to be conducted to find out the truth.

Adam Levine had a fiduciary duty to preserve our valuable collection for the future, and he should never have reneged on a commitment to lending our Avenue at Chantilly to an important public show. The Art Institute of Chicago is the true example of what all museums strive for — this show is the third blockbuster they have put on since the pandemic. Our museum, under Adam Levine’s leadership has done nothing but sell off our great French Impressionist paintings.

We should save our museum and save our city’s reputation by changing course now with new leadership at the museum.

EDITORIAL – TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART SHOULD KEEP ITS TOP TIER

The Blade, Editorial Board, April 25, 2022

Selling off Paul Cezanne’s Clairière (The Glade); Henri Matisse’s Fleurs ou Fleurs devant un portrait; and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Nu s’essuyant simply makes no sense. These and other proven lasting works draw people to the museum from near and far.

Every museum director retains the right to pursue their own paths as Adam Levine is doing. Yet the museum is an integral part of Toledo’s art culture. The museum is not in a vacuum. While privately maintained, the museum does represent Toledo to the outside world.

Tags Adam Levine, John Stanley, Kerry James Marshall, The Blade, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art

Artists of Toledo

August open letter to the museum

Post author By pennygentieu
Post date August 8, 2022
1 Comment on August open letter to the museum

A lot of brave Americans fought and died under the American flag…Toledo is Jeep country, after all. Have some respect.

Open Letter to the Board of Directors of The Toledo Museum of Art:

For the museum to buy a burnt flag to hang on the museum’s wall, telling us they are collecting art that reflects our community, is disgusting.

Here is my blog post about how this acquisition is deeply offensive because the deceased donors from whom the funds were pulled to purchase it were veterans and a burnt American flag deeply dishonors them. Those donors are Marvin and Lenore Kobacker, Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Barber, three of which had served under the flag in World War II.

Additional issues I wish to address:

What about the remote stewards (workers) of our museum? Since when are the people who run the Toledo museum too good to live here? Along with the spokesman about the sale of the French Impressionist paintings, John Stanley, a retired temporary consultant without an art degree who came from New York who I am pretty sure does not live in Toledo, I’m referring to the Communications Manager who lives in Lansing, the Brand Director who lives in Boulder, the consulting curator of African Art, Lanisa Kitchiner, who works full time for the Library of Congress in Washington DC (who doesn’t have an art history degree), and the consulting curator of Ancient Art, Carlos Picón, who is the director of the Colnaghi art gallery in New York and an ancient art dealer. I wrote a blog post about it, about our authentic story, and about the museum’s treatment of the local artist community. The Remote Control of Our Museum Culture.

What about the $54 million from the Cézanne and Matisse deaccessions that had been purchased with the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Fund? Shouldn’t that have gone back to the Edward Drummond Libbey fund to be used on new acquisitions? Where did that money go? Is it in a new endowment as stated by Adam Levine in his April 8 announcement of the deaccessioning of the three French Impressionist paintings? If so, what is the name of the fund? And if so, why is it not back in the Libbey fund, and what financial institution handles that fund?

Will the museum and/or board members be making an investigation into the sale of the Cézanne and Matisse paintings that sold at auction collectively for $59 million to the SAME buyer, as reported in Barron’s Magazine (but not in The Blade for some reason)? What are the odds? Since this puts a cloud of corruption hanging over the museum in regard to the possibility that the sale was prearranged with the buyer, the museum and board should investigate and make public the buyer to clear the museum’s reputation, if that would be the case, since our museum should be beyond reproach. What valuable paintings will be the next to hit the auction block? These outrageous deaccessions of valuable historic paintings that were literally taken off the museum walls and sent to the auction house, an action rationalized by the museum director’s lies to the public, and the huge amount of money made by the sale – that for us not to know who bought the paintings, or whether or not the sale was prearranged, is unacceptable. Is our collection being used as a catalog for future collectors? It’s a good way to hide backroom deals. It’s a good way for our museum to be robbed of its great artworks.

Why has the radius of the museum’s community outreach and interest shrunk to only 2 miles, when the area that the museum serves is vastly larger? In 2014, the museum claimed that their reach was a 150-mile radius, when they increased the area of the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition to reach out to the major cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus. Before that, our community was defined by the 95-year old annual show as being 17 counties in Northwest Ohio and two counties in Southeast Michigan. The two-mile outreach defined now is not even 1/6th of the city of Toledo, not to mention the other many counties surrounding Toledo. Why isn’t the community equally represented on the Belonging Committee? In the museum’s latest manifesto about plans for community “belonging” there is nothing at all about the new local artists gallery that was heralded in The Blade in June 2021, for which Robert and Sue Savage donated $200,000 to renovate a gallery space that would have their name on it. A photo was taken with the mayor, director, and Robert and Sue Savage to memorialize the commitment. Are artists not a fundamental part of the art museum? Why aren’t local artists invited to “Belong?”

In summary, there should be a special oversight looking over our museum right now. Our museum does not belong to outsiders, nor to just a fraction of the community, it belongs to ALL of us, the entire Toledo community. The people who run the museum ought to live here! That people who run the museum are “too good” to live here robs our city of culture, progress and money. Our museum is not a vehicle for outsiders to mold into something for their own personal benefits and gains. They are ripping us off! Conflicts of interest should be disclosed on every level, from the purchase to the sale of artworks, to the business relationships of the board members with the museum; from communications involving the museum and the press, to the curation of our community stories. There must be full disclosure for every move the museum makes. The people who run the museum have a fiduciary responsibility to our Toledo institution, and lying to the public is a breach of their fiduciary duty.

Thank you for your time. I hope you are having a good summer.

Sincerely,

Penny Gentieu

Tags Adam Levine, Carlos Picón, John Stanley, Kerry James Marshall, Lenisa Kitchiner, The Blade, Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, Toledo Museum of Art

The Toledo 2-Mile Radius Museum of Art

Adam Levine’s recent guest editorial in The Blade

Comments on Adam Levine’s March 26, 2023 editorial

The Libbey Endowment Trust variance

5-year plan said so

over budget already, and it’s only been 2 years

the remote control of the museum

Why “rebrand” the museum?

TMA was greater when the budget was half as much

Selling our valuable and historic art

Invoking Libbey to pass off a lie

TMA has never not explored world art

Unimpressive shows and few of them

The shape of things to come

Nearest neighbors being left out? a big lie

A siphon and a funnel

Closing museum on a Friday to dismantle the Great Gallery for a private party for themselves and the 2-mile radius

Not very Libbey-like

Art-making experiences for seniors in the 2-mile radius only siphoning $9,998 per art-making session

we made you but now we decided to eliminate you

Money and politics

expanding? or pushing us over the edge?

What George Stevens said in 1903

What would our founders think?

An assessment of the offerings at Adam Levine’s Toledo Museum of Art two years into the five-year plan

The 2022 Burns Halperin Report

The Artists of Toledo Report

Just passing through…

The Big Middle

Beauty without bias

Cannibalizing our museum

Impressionism speaking for our community

Pass the remote, please

The Artists of Toledo Report:

The Artists of Toledo Report Findings:

37.5% Women 62.5% Men 57% American 43% Rest of World 28% American Women 30% American Men 14% Black American 4% Native American 40% Other Americans

The rise and fall of a once-great museum

We’d like to have adult and children’s art classes back. I hope this proposal helps.

Toledo Museum’s new culture of belonging does not mean they can keep looted belongings of another culture.

The museum says one thing but does another.

The 2013 repatriation of the Italian water jug

About the Subhash Kapoor-looted Asian antiquities

The true meaning of Belonging

Cezanne Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago May 15 – September 5, 2022

Additional issues I wish to address:

Art-making experiences for seniors in the 2-mile radius only
siphoning $9,998 per art-making session

An assessment of the offerings at
Adam Levine’s Toledo Museum of Art
two years into the five-year plan

37.5% Women 62.5% Men
57% American 43% Rest of World
28% American Women 30% American Men
14% Black American 4% Native American 40% Other Americans

We’d like to have adult and children’s art classes back.
I hope this proposal helps.

Cezanne Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago
May 15 – September 5, 2022