Tag: Adam Weinberg

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Artists of Toledo

The 21st Century Battle of Toledo

I love this story about the Toledo Museum of Art. The author, James Moore, kindly granted me permission to share it here. 

They are the words of a highly distinguished curator who got his professional start at the museum. James Moore left Toledo to become the first director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, directing it for 26 years. 

In the 1970s, James Moore served as a coordinator for the Art History department at the Toledo Museum of Art.

It was the most unique workplace I have ever experienced. The professional staff (curators/educators) all met in the restaurant for coffee at 10 and again at 2. It wasn’t required, but it was traditional enough that if you missed one, you apologized and explained at the next one. That was where our informal interaction took place, an activity highly important in any healthy corporate organization but all too often ignored.

At Toledo nobody would have ever thought of dropping into someone’s office just to chat. Once in the saddle and off to work, we were all business.

One day at coffee we were celebrating Bob Phillips’ birthday. While passing out the cake, Roberta Waddell, Curator of Prints humorously prodded everyone to reveal their age. To our surprise, with the exception of Bill Hutton (Senior Curator), who was 50, we were all between the ages of 38 and 41, including Roger Mandle, who was the director then.

Surprised, we sat there looking at each other in silence.

Then Roberta grinned and said: “You know what’s happened, kids? They’ve turned it over to us!”

We laughed but had to fight back the tears. “It,” of course, was the collection.

“They” cast a long shadow indeed, and we could see their work on the walls and feel them following us around every day.

Given “their” example, how could one not do one’s absolute best? How could one possibly let “them” down?

I know of no other story that better explains what it felt like to work at Toledo.

To be a curator is not a matter of selecting things. Curation is, first and foremost, knowledge of and care for, a collection.

 

2014

Native Toledoan Nettie Poe Ketchum, born 1865, was a cousin of Edgar Allen Poe. She donated the Swiss Room to the Toledo Museum of Art in 1926. She died in Switzerland in 1950, bequeathing her estate to the TMA School of Art and the Toledo YWCA in equal parts. She had been impressed to learn on a visit to the art school in 1933, that that working women took art classes at the museum on certain nights and on other nights had activites at the YWCA.

The changing of the guards

The culture of the museum carries on. Generations later, there is still a sense of awe and camaraderie amongst the employees. They love the museum. The museum, with its collection, has always been and will always be (unless they sell it) the epitome of excellence.

The collection is the result of a $10 million endowment to the museum from the Libbeys in 1925. The fund would be worth maybe $3.66 billion today if it had only grown 6% annual interest and never had been touched for 101 years. But since it’s been used quite effectively all these years; while being conservatively invested, it is worth today about $34 million.

Edward Drummond Libbey and his wife, Florence Scott Libbey wanted to give the people of Toledo a gift. After all, Libbey made his fortune in industrial glass here, and he wanted to give back to his workers, their families, and all the people of the city.  He did so in the most democratic way.  He endowed a museum with art and art education, and made it forever free for all people to attend.

To make his gift last, Edward Drummond Libbey had an ingenious condition regarding the use of the funds. The condition was that for any money withdrawn, 50% would have to be spent on art. Working in perfect harmony with this plan, curators over time have purchased the very best art for the collection. Today this collection well-exceeds the $3.56 billion of our 6% estimated return on the original investment if it was never touched. It’s worth well into the double digit billions. The 57 masterworks that are currently on tour in New Zealand and Australia as a group are worth $1 billion or more.

The endowment’s 50% rule has transformed itself into a continual stream of new art for the cultural benefit of the people of Toledo, as it was a gift to the people, under the historic charitable trust of Edward Drummond Libbey.

The Museum in the Seventies

In the 1970s, when James Moore was there, the museum was highly culturally productive. The community drew its vitality from its existence in the heart of the art world, which was the museum.

Local artists were supported within the museum system, which showcased their work in a prestigious annual juried exhibition that grew into a nearly century-long tradition. The museum also provided the public with an exceptional art education, particularly through its year-round city-wide children’s classes held every Saturday.

Toledo believed that curators should be educators first. Each year, a competitive fellowship program brought together six or more talented young art history scholars from the best colleges across the country to work at the museum. In addition to gaining firsthand experience with the museum’s collection, fellows were required to teach children’s classes. The children’s education program was a tremendous gift to Toledoans, myself included.

Perhaps 50 fellows came through this program during this decade, many going on to prestigious positions in the art world. For example, the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic of the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, and the Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Adam Weinberg.

Adding organically to the texture of the world’s arts culture, the museum gave to the city all of this, and did so, so leanly. The annual budget of the museum was about $1.34 million, or $10.59 million in today’s dollars. (Today’s budget is close to three times that, with none of that anymore.)

All this as the art collection grew.

The 21st century Battle of Toledo

After the untimely resignation of Director Brian Kennedy in March of 2019, and the year-long search for a new director, during which John Stanley was hired in the interim, Adam Levine, the youngest director ever, began his tenure. He started exactly when covid hit – in April 2020.

Adam Levine “leverages” the Libbey collection. He speaks openly about it. He is using the collection to transform the museum right down to the “physical studs.” He is not as much a curator as he is an excavator-turned contractor.

He calls it, “Transformation 2027,” a strategy slowly revealed to the public with what began as a plan to update the HVAC system, funded by a bond issued by three different Ohio port authorities for $25 million.

Adam Levine will not reveal the financial details of “Transformation 2027.”

Whereas the museum had always been supported locally, it went out of its way collecting donations from any and everywhere possible, strings or no strings. The new sources include anonymous donors, institutional grants, government-related funders of all kinds, and construction-linked donors. These new donors overshadow the long-time local family philanthropy, Toledo corporate giving, and broad membership support that for 125 years has kept the museum going quite successfully, and locally, carrying out Libbeys’ intentions and visions for the people of Toledo.

Adam Levine collected federal public funds during the pandemic meant to help support hurting institutions. He obtained a two-year variance on Libbey Endowment”s 50% rule, so that the money earmarked to buy art could be used for the “care of art” instead. Was it to the best advantage of the trust and for the people of Toledo? Considering that he used the money to prepare paintings for shipment outside of the country so that he could leverage the art and finance his makeover of the museum, I would argue that the variance obviously was not in the best interests of the trust, which was to provide culture to the people of Toledo.

He took a $6M federal loan forgiveness in 2021. Who would blame him for taking the free money. But with it, he raised the operating budget fast and high, and there was no looking back.

His funding sources even cut into the precious Libbey art collection — in 2022 he sold three exquisite paintings by Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir for $59.7 million dollars. He did not buy art with it as it is stated in the will. He did not put it back into the Libbey Fund earmarked for art purchases. He created a brand-new fund the size of the “Libbey corpus” with the Cezanne and Matisse proceeds, out of sight from public scrutiny of the Libbey Fund.

Attendance never recovered after the pandemic
Data source: 2019–2024 TMA annual reports; CMA and AAM chart: google.

The museum staff grew by perhaps 50% or more since Adam Levine started. Whereas in 2017 the museum reports 150 employees, in 2025 we heard reports of 350 employees.

One might wonder, what was the point of the increase in staff, because the museum never recovered from the “pandemic rupture.” The attendance reported in the annual reports had been flat from 2021 through the last annual report published, 2024.

Toledo is a union town

One day in 2024, the employees of the visitor services, glass studio, research, education, curatorial and library departments started talking about forming a union. They loved the museum and were passionate about their jobs; they wanted job security. They could foresee the future and wanted to protect themselves. They were as unified a group of museum workers today as they had been throughout the museum’s history.

They formed a union, under the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), of about 100 workers, which was officially recognized in the spring of 2025.

A story about the formation of the union, Toledo Art Museum Workers Move to Unionize, was published by Hyperallergic on April 11, 2025.

Skye Sloane, a team leader for visitor services, told Hyperallergic, the reinstallation project is “a significant change to the institution that we all love, and we wanted to band together and feel sure and secure in our new jobs, benefits, and wages, before the project is completed.”

TMA chief people officer Jennifer McCary told Hyperallergic that TMA “respects the democratic process and remain committed to fostering a supportive and collaborative work environment for all employees.”

For a museum that supposedly prided themselves as having great employee relations, it seems that they suddenly became union busters. A few of the employees who were interviewed or who posed for the photo in the Hyperallergic article, among other vocal employees of the union, are no longer working at the museum today – one year later.

The museum talks the talk but it won’t walk it.

This is Objective 3 of Adam Levine’s 2021 five-year strategic plan:

Become an Employer of Choice — Visitors will be “shocked and delighted to be welcomed by a diverse and empowered staff so clearly loving what they do and the institution they serve,” and visitors will also be “eyeing the posted job opportunities, hoping for a chance to work for an institution known widely for treating its staff so well.

An employer of choice would allow their staff to have direct collective bargaining power, to ensure fairness and security for themselves and for their coworkers.

Especially in Toledo, a union town.

Letting their guards down

Now, in 2026, as the guards tried to unionize, the museum terminated the guards only to rehire them through an outside company, stripping them of health insurance, retirement benefits, reduced hours and more.

A story about the the guards, TMA guards express hurt, surprise at outsourcing services, was published by Toledo Free Press on April 23, 2026.

The guards wanted to form a union. They filed a petition with the NLRB to do so. But they were immediately cut off at their knees – given notice that they were being terminated but that they could be rehired by the company called (ironically) “Safeguard.” Safeguard is the outside company that the museum had been using for patrolling outside the building and the parking lot. And now this outside company is in charge of the inside, and the workers who once worked for the museum have been taken down.

Frank, museum guard, at the entrance of the Glass Pavilion, 2014

The guards were probably the largest category of employees at the museum — I counted 75 names listed one year on an annual report. They are the frontline, the security, the ambassadors, the people that safeguard the art and connect visitors with the art. They are the most beloved employees at the museum, and they have been downgraded and degraded by an ever-ballooning administration that even hired a special chief people officer a few years ago to keep up with the growing staff and instill a culture of belonging (what a joke) — and look what they are doing now.

Adam Levine’s  “Transformation 2027”

In March of 2026, along with out-sourcing the staff, we heard news that our priceless artwork was being shipped out of town en masse.

As Adam Levine tears the museum down to the studs, removing our art and shipping it all over the world for exhibitions and storing the rest in art storage facilities in various cities in the U.S., he is also destroying the museum’s own corporate foundational ecosphere built to care for the art.

It makes you wonder, is this going to land well, or are we presently witnessing the total implosion of our museum?

Hey Adam — that’s our Rembrandt! Can you please tell us where it is at this exact moment? And where is everything else?

The 1934 Battle of Toledo:  A bronze statue created by Hai Ying Wu paid tribute to Toledo’s role in America’s labor history during the two-month long strike at the Autolite factory. Forged at the university’s sculpture studio behind the museum, it was installed at Union Memorial Park at Elm and Champlain streets in 2000. Removed in 2019, it was put in storage, but the ghosts remain. Ironically, the Autolite company’s president’s trust is one of TMA’s largest donors.
Click on this comment to read an ongoing discussion on Toledo Now Facebook page
after all that they have shown us,
How can the directors be deserving of our trust?

It’s OUR museum.

The Libbey Trust, over 101 years, has transformed itself into many billions of dollars worth of public art. The Libbeys intended it for the people, not for leveraging power of a director.

It belongs to the people. For our art to be scattered all over the world — in international exhibitions and in storage facilities across America – while our museum undergoes “transformation” and workers lose jobs is outrageous!

James Moore, the former TMA employee who inspired this essay, has had a distinguished career in the art world. His early life was shaped by the unique culture of Toledo, and the principles learned at TMA have guided him throughout his career. He has been a trustee of the Wichita Art Museum, a lecturer at University of Mexico, a member of the Collections Committee of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and is the Director Emeritus of The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History.

He wrote an opinion piece published in the Berkshire Eagle in 2018 regarding museum stewardship. The context concerned the unethical deaccessions taking place at the time at the Berkshire Museum. It rings true today.  James Moore: Museum’s violation of trust will have far-reaching impact.  

We speak of “trustees,” and the “public trust,” but these are abstractions. In reality, it comes down to assessing whether a museum is trustworthy by evaluating whether the people managing and governing it are themselves trustworthy. This is the basis for ethical behavior among people, both internally with employees and externally with the public.

I would end this essay here but there is no end in sight…. So many problems … hence, a petition is underway addressed to the Ohio Attorney General to enforce Libbey’s Will and protect Toledo’s art.

Years of planning, intention, effort and money went into to the building of the Glass Pavilion for the museum’s collection of glass. Then along comes Adam Levine telling us that “it was not conceived as a place where glass would be displayed always and forever.” Umm…really?

DECEMBER 1, 2000 – Selecting an architect: SANAA, Ltd., based in Tokyo, was chosen as architect for the Museum’s proposed Center for Glass. The firm’s lead architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, who are emerging as international talents, are known for their highly refined and innovative handling of glass and space. The Center for Glass will commemorate the Museum’s century-long glass heritage and, at the same time, provide a state-of-the-art facility for the Museum’s glass collection.
Letter to the Attorney General

Thank you for signing, and please add your name if you have not already, to the Petition to enforce Libbey’s Will, here.

April 4, 2026

 

To the Office of the Attorney General:

 

While our masterpieces are currently scattered in storage facilities across the country and our galleries are stripped to the studs, we refuse to let the Libbey Will be dismantled along with the walls. We are calling for State Intervention to ensure that the planned reopening does not become a permanent downsizing of our cultural inheritance.

 

We, the undersigned—including Toledo residents, born and raised Toledoans, visitors, friends, art historians, and stakeholders—formally request an investigation into the Board of Directors of the Toledo Museum of Art for apparent violations of the ITEM XXV–LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT of EDWARD DRUMMOND LIBBEY.

 

We believe the current leadership has deviated from the Trust’s mandates in the following ways:

 

1. Loss of continuous public exhibition
The Will requires that works be properly housed for public exhibition. Multi-year closures and removal of art from view undermine this mandate.

 

2. Dismantling of the collection’s integrity
Sales of major works and long-term international loans reduce the cohesion and accessibility of the collection.

 

3. Removal of art from its purpose-built home
The Libbey building was designed to safeguard and display the collection. Relocating works to storage and transit exposes them to unnecessary risk.

 

4. Public subsidy without public accountability
Despite tax-exempt status and public funding support, major decisions have been made without transparent public engagement.

 

5. Breach of the museum’s open-access mission
Extended closures exceed what could reasonably be considered “temporary” and deny access to a unique regional cultural resource.

 

We ask that your office exercise its authority under Ohio Rev. Code §109.24 to review these actions and ensure that this charitable trust is administered in accordance with its founding purpose.

 

The Toledo Museum of Art was created for the public—and must remain so.

 

Respectfully submitted,

[1,150 petition signers as of May 10 and counting.]

 

Read more about the petition to enforce Libbey’s will on this page of artistsoftoledo and please share:

About the Petition to Enforce Libbey’s Will

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Artists of Toledo

The Artists of Toledo Report

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

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Artists of Toledo

Proposal to hire art teachers at the Toledo Museum of Art

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:

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Toledo Museum of Art: Repair the Damage

Adam Weinberg was a truly great, forward thinking, community oriented Toledo Museum Fellow, presently the Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. I photographed him in the cornfield adjacent to his house in 1979.

Toledo Museum of Art, repair the damage you have done to the community of artists.

In 2010, perhaps when the museum was between directors, the acting director and Amy Gilman of the museum made a proposal to the Federation, that they would get great jurors with their museum connections and make Toledo artists famous. Maybe not in those exact words, but that’s what the Federation heard. Whatever the exact words were, the museum’s “intention” of commandeering the show was to help the community by making a better Toledo Area Artists show by getting more prestigious jurors, an intention reported in The Blade in 2010 and 2011.

The museum judged it themselves the first year, in 2011, saying that they were introducing the new director, Brian Kennedy, to the community. They used a Mellon Fellow and New York artist and writer Joe Fig the second year.

This year, instead of making the show for the community, the museum extended it to cover a population 15 times greater than the population of the Toledo area. They had their Mellon Fellow, Halona Norton-Westbrook, judge it all by herself. She put in only 11 Toledo area artists, including two museum employees, the husband of a museum employee, one former employee with former contentious museum relationship, the two most recent past presidents of the Federation, the group that had charge of the show when the museum took it over in 2011. Hence, most of the Toledo area artists chosen by the museum were insiders. 17 other artists were from other cities.

The population of Greater Detroit alone is five times that of the Toledo metro area. So you can see that a show that was highly competitive in our local area, has become instantly 10-15 times more competitive by adding a 150 mile radius encompassing 4 cities much larger than Toledo, plus several other cities with more advantage than Toledo, such as Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, Michigan. And why is this good for our community? For countless area artists like my daughter, the odds are they will never have a chance.

Toledo Museum of Art, is it necessary to take our community show away from us to get a grant? Get Fellows at our museum like Adam Weinberg, the current Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was a charismatic, community oriented Fellow, who worked at the Toledo Museum of Art in the late 1970’s. Put someone like Adam Weinberg in charge of the TAA show. Make the jurying process fair again with objective, outside jurors having no connections to the community. Make it professional, and make it for Toledo area artists, because that is the legacy of Edward Drummond Libbey, and that is the legacy of the Toledo Museum of Art.

Break it off completely with the Federation. Most of the artists groups dropped out of the Federation after the museum took over the show in 2011, leaving mainly universities and college groups. It used to be composed of groups of artists, not schools, and we don’t need to debate to know that educational institutions do not serve the interests of individual artists — they serve their own institutional interests, and so these institutions do not deserve a seat at this table.

For the previous 94 years, the Toledo area artists have been good enough to be in their own namesake Toledo Area Artists art show. Look at what you are doing to our community! Respectfully, please understand that even though people may appreciate your leadership, we all know you are not from around here, and it is likely that your time at the Toledo Museum of Art will be temporary. Don’t mess with our traditions as if they have no value. It’s like poisoning our water and then skedaddling.

The Toledo Museum of Art was voted the most beloved museum by its community recently. People today donate to the Toledo Museum of Art believing in a community memory of a community oriented museum. How can the museum literally nurture so many artists within its mission and its history, then just hang us out to dry, replaced by artists from other cities? Our area has so much potential for the growth of the art economy in this area. We don’t mean Cleveland or Detroit or Columbus, we mean Toledo! Yet the museum is communally dumbing us down by taking this great opportunity away from the majority of Toledo area artists and handing it over to anybody else in the 150 mile radius, for what, for a more impressive population “line item” on a grant application?

Toledo area artists have always been good enough for the show for the past 95 years. This year the museum throws us under the bus. For a shallow, very shallow, empty purpose. As if to say we are not as good artists as other artists living 150 miles away. Reconsider saving the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition for Toledo area artists. It’s good for us, and as you know, as the museum made it its motto, “art matters” to us.

Give us another Adam Weinberg. He would never have thrown Toledo artists under the bus.

From The Toledo Museum of Art’s mission statement:

COMMUNITY RELEVANCE: We will be an integral member of our community and will be responsive to issues of community concern and importance, particularly as they relate to the arts.

VALUES: As individuals, we pledge that our relationships with one another and with our audiences will be governed by: Integrity; Respect; Trust; Cooperation; Positive Approach; and Self-Discipline.

 

Brian Kennedy’s slide presentation of the museum’s mission, at the 2011 TAA Jury Dinner. Artist Craig Fisher and his daughter in foreground.

STRATIGIC OBJECTIVES — Working with artists.   Work with us. We are your offspring! The Toledo Museum of Art made us! Aren’t we good enough for The Toledo Museum of Art, Papa?

Another suggestion is to make the gallery off of the Community Gallery for Toledo artists, instead of for babies. Up until 1970, Toledo area artists used to get monthly one-person shows. Now they have a gallery for baby art. Literally. (Toledo Area Lil’ Artists Exhibition — gee thanks, TMA, adding insult to injury.) This nicely lit gallery at the back entrance to the museum. For babies? Seriously, you can do better for us, can’t you, Toledo Museum of Art?