Tag: Brian Chambers

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Artists of Toledo

Before they sold off masterpieces prominently on display

Our museum should not be a catalog for billionaires to add to their art collection at our expense.

The day I shot these photos, on October 13, 1979, I was teaching a children’s Saturday photo class. It took place under the stage of the Peristyle. We went up to the galleries, as Saturday classes often would.

This photo is of the center entrance of the museum. The first gallery a visitor would come to was that gallery in the upper left, and on view here, in the distance, is the famed Cezanne, The Glade, that Adam Levine sold at auction on May 17, 2022, touting it was necessary in order for diversity.

This is a student in my class. She’s taking her first photo — in it appears The Glade by Cezanne, which is right next to Renoir’s Bather, which was also sold off by Adam Levine.

This photo shows a diverse group of people in that very gallery — so why did Adam Levine think that the museum did not attract diversity? Is it because he was using diversity as a smokescreen for his outrageous sale of three French Impressionist paintings, two of which were bought with funds from the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment and were Libbey’s gift to to the people of Toledo, but Adam Levine took those proceeds and funded a separate private fund devoid of public scrutiny and against the wishes of the Libbeys — in the amount equal to that of the Libbey Fund?

Right next to the Cezanne and the Renoir paintings that Adam Levine sold is Renoir’s sculpture of a bather, shown here on the left. Adam Levine considered the painting of the bather by Renoir redundant and not necessary for the museum to keep, since they had the sculpture of the bather by Renoir. He said that the museum never intended to have more than one example of any one artist so therefore they sold the Renoir painting of the bather. Note the diverse group of children drawing on the floor in this room.

After leaving the first gallery, where the Cezanne and Renoir paintings were shown prominently, a visitor would enter the next gallery, where one of the first paintings in the gallery hanging on the right would be Henri Matisse’s Fleurs ou Fleurs devant un portrait that Adam Levine also sold. Here, a visitor examines a sculpture by Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), Le Monument à Debussy, (in conversation with the Renoir sculpture in the first gallery) with the Matisse painting hanging in the background.

Important to the museum’s collection.

So that’s three very famous, highly valuable paintings that were prominently on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, showing that these were the first paintings out of hundred of works of art that a museum visitor would encounter. But in 2022, these highly valuable paintings were called redundant and mediocre by Adam Levine, and sold for “diversity,” supposedly.

Here are two young black men enjoying the museum. This was in 1979. The museum has always had a diverse audience. But now Director Adam Levine keeps careful head count, mapping and going out of his way to exploit diversity or is that just a cover for the unconscionable sales he made of the museum’s great artwork?

Here’s a shot of the photography classroom under the stage of the Peristyle. In the background, a student is drying his print on the ferrotyping drum.

Incidentally, the children’s Saturday photography classes have also disappeared.

Photography is such an interesting medium. How could I have known then, when I was taking these photographs, that they would have such meaning today?

43 years later, three important and significant paintings that were hanging in the museum’s main galleries would be shipped to Sotheby’s where the Cezanne and the Matisse would be sold to the same buyer, for $57 million, and all three, grossing $61 million, would duplicate the value of the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Fund, putting the money into a private fund, not subject to public scrutiny, and skirting past Libbey’s rules and wishes for the museum that the Libbeys began. Reducing the art collection and taking away Libbey’s legacy. Shame on Adam Levine and shame on each one of the museum board members and Libbey Endowment trustees for their total breach of fiduciary duty and loyalty to the Libbey Trust and to the Toledo Museum of Art.

We will never see the paintings on the museum walls again. But I have photos. And this story to tell.

(If you zoom in on the flash, you will see me there.)

I am hoping that the findings of the Charitable Law Section of the Ohio Attorney General, which has been investigating the museum and the Libbey Trust for about five months now, will be bringing justice to Libbey’s trust, to our museum, and to the people of Toledo. The Ohio Attorney General’s office has the power to find out who bought the paintings and under what circumstances. They can investigate all the inner workings of the board of directors and the trustees of the trust that let this happen. They can do a complete audit. Can Adam Levine and the trustees of the museum and the Libbey trust actually be allowed to transform Libbey’s endowment into private funds devoid of the restrictions of the Libbey Endowment?

Categories
Artists of Toledo

A Toledo picture

A Toledo picture…. Yesterday and today

What is a Toledo picture, exactly?

The museum’s first curator of European art, William Hutton called a “Toledo picture” a painting worthy of the Toledo Museum of Art, a museum that owns what is said to be the very best Peter Paul Rubens in the country. A Toledo picture is something that would “hold its head up” alongside the Rothko, for example.

From Rubens to the burnt American flag

The Toledo Museum of Art used to be about art, but now it’s about community mobilization. They are building community centers outside the museum under the guise of bringing art to the low income housing projects. They don’t bring the residents to the museum because they say that the residents are put off by the museum’s opulence — they have to go to them. They have segregated our Toledo community into separate communities.

Meanwhile, they are rearranging the collection in our museum to what they think will better suit the people who live within the 2-mile radius who don’t come to the museum.

They sold a masterpiece right off the wall for $41.7 million dollars and put the money in a secret fund, not back into the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment. We can only guess that it is perhaps because Edward is symbolic of colonization, or some rationale like that.

put yourself in their shoes

They remind us that the land underneath the spot where the museum stands once belonged to the native peoples of Northwest Ohio before the Libbey family claimed ownership of it. What’s more, Libbey came to Toledo from out east and used the sand of what was once the land of native peoples to build his industrial glass factory fortune. He made so much money that he funded the art museum. So therefore of course they would feel that they can do whatever they want with the museum. That makes total sense.

All of this looks good on a grant application – helping the poor – reclaiming native American rights – rejuvenating a tired old museum – a great cover while they ramshackle our great museum.

Canceling our membership and getting our money back
(oh yes we did)

My husband and I, former recent members of the Toledo Museum of Art, are not a part of the museum’s desired community, although we used to be welcome as members and visitors of the museum. We live outside the 2-mile radius, five miles away, inside the city of Toledo, but just too far away from the core.

We wrote multiple letters in the spring and summer addressing multiple issues that I have written about on this blog. Our important issues were never answered. So in September 2022 we wrote another detailed letter, this time to the membership department (not to be confused with the belonging department, because that department is exclusively for the desired communities they are rallying within the 2-mile activation radius of the museum.) We asked for our membership fee back.

Three weeks later, right before our membership was set to end, the museum sent us a check for the full amount of our membership fee. No apologies, no explanations, enclosed with a long-overdue Art Matters Magazine, and a note saying she hoped we like the new Art Matters, as if they managed to publish a new Art Matters especially for us. Must have been difficult for the new out-of-town employees to pull off. They haven’t managed to publish another Art Matters, and it’s March 2023. But soon they won’t have many members left at the museum who are like us, (they have everyone neatly categorized by zip code) and so they won’t need to publish an Art Matters at all. Just a prediction based on my experience.

Why are they so radical?

From what I can tell, it dates back to a Facebook post of the Toledo Black Artist Coalition (the group that picketed in front of the museum after Adam Levine came out with his infamous George Floyd memo stating that the museum should remain neutral in light of the national protests.) It was the fall of 2020 and Rhonda Sewell put a heart emoji on a post about racial reckoning rocketing through art museums (see below), and that museums have to change – a lot. Rhonda Sewell of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, who once was a journalist at The Blade was not an art historian or a curator, or even a museum administrator, but five months later she inaugurated a new department at the museum, becoming the first director of a “Belonging and Community Engagement” Department.

November 18, 2020: Rhonda Sewell’s heart emoji on a Toledo Black Artist Coalition facebook post of a painting that is not in our museum, but the implication is that the Toledo Museum is elitist and racist.

The Department of Belonging and Community Engagement

Shit rapidly hit the fan — they closed the museum on a Friday in October 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.

A Photo of the Great Gallery without Old Master paintings

Here is a photo I took of a great Toledoan, the first female Toledo city council member, in 1993, June Boyd with her great grandchildren posing in the middle of the Great Gallery on October 27, 2021. I just want to say here that I hope June Boyd’s book about the history of Black Toledo gets published soon, so that there will be an authentic voice of the history in which she plays such an important part.

Happy 110th Birthday

It went gangbusters thereafter for Rhonda at the Toledo Museum of Art. The museum opened on a Monday in 2022, for the first time ever, which Toledoans enjoyed. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which happened to fall on the same day as the 110th anniversary of the opening of the museum. But the museum didn’t publicize that little fact – I was there and not any of the employees I asked on that day knew that it was such a special day in the history of the museum. It was as if the new Toledo Museum of Art hated the old Toledo Museum of Art so much that they couldn’t even say Happy Birthday.

Then they sold three famous paintings for $59 million, for diversity-sake, then raised their parking fee by 45%, to make the museum more inclusive.

They announced the purchase of new art, with the burnt American flag painting featured in a photo slide show in the article on The Blade.

They announced that they were building art making stations in federally funded housing projects and equipping them with teachers. Bravo, museum, it’s so generous of them to do the Arts Commission’s job and Lucas County’s  job and the City of Toledo’s job for them. This after the great educational program that they used to have for the general public for most of the 20th century has dissipated into hardly anything. It was a robust school that taught 2,500 public school children on Saturdays and college students along with adult community members during the week. It appears that they are siphoning what they used to offer to the entire community, to concentrate it outside the museum into federally funded housing projects and “communities” in just a 2-mile radius of the museum.

Meanwhile, our only remaining Cezanne that was promised to the Art Institute of Chicago’s major, international Cezanne show had been taken out of that show (while appearing full-page in the show’s catalog.)

They put on hardly any exhibitions, but they did mount two shows of artwork in need of restoration. The second of these shows was used as a fundraiser to raise money to restore art that the public could “adopt” for a short period of time with their name associated with it.

They featured a 1925 glass dress which to the Toledo community represents the Libbeys. The museum should have spent their own funds to restore it. Especially since they just received upwards of $500,000 from the Libbey Trusts for a Pandemic variance to use funds earmarked for buying artwork, for “direct care of artwork” such as for restoration, instead.

Freedom of Speech

The museum tried to get The Blade to retract my statements in my guest editorial, but I did not say anything that was not either factual or my opinion.

That’s how it rolls in the 419 area code of Toledo Ohio. And that’s how things like this can happen to the museum right under our nose.

I can write my blog on my website and I can post on my Facebook page. But on a Facebook group of 3,000 artists in Toledo, the Artists of 419, I haven’t been allowed to share my Artists of Toledo blog posts or make comments about things such as the recent launch of the Community Gallery. It took a guest editorial in The Blade to be allowed to make a post, but only of the editorial, all other attempts to share information were censored and blocked.

I’m just glad that I was invited by The Blade to submit a guest editorial, which was printed last Saturday, March 18, 2022 as a Saturday Essay.

It was June Boyd’s exercise of freedom of speech expressed in a Saturday Essay in The Blade that lead me to photograph her at the museum seventeen months ago. Her Saturday Essay was printed in The Blade on October 9, 2021, Let’s come together to save Toledo’s children, I wanted to meet her, so one day we got together at the Kent Library where I interviewed her and asked to photograph her.

I was researching Toledo’s mayor back in 1901, Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones at the time. Here’s the post I wrote: Whitlock, Jones and June Boyd. “Golden Rule” Jones’s house stood on the land on which the Toledo Museum of Art’s Peristyle now stands (I must also mention that his land was once held by native Americans before the colonization took place, but also it’s important to note that “Golden Rule” Jones gave away every dollar of his mayoral salary to the poor every month. Wish Adam Levine would.)

June suggested the museum as a good location for our shoot. We met there with her great grandkids, who were all decked out as if a stylist dressed them in matching sweaters that June got. (A photo would later be used on their Christmas greeting.)

It was the week following the John Legend concert, and the Great Gallery still had the contemporary paintings by Black artists hanging in it.

When I hear the lie that the Cezanne was in storage, such as I read in the comments to my editorial on the Artists of 419 Facebook page, this photo is the proof that that is false information. The painting was actually taken off the gallery wall and sold for $41.7 million. The museum has nothing to show for it today. It’s apparently in a secret fund, not back in the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment from whence it came. The Endowment is open to public scrutiny, but according to what the director told members and the press, the proceeds from the auction are in a completely new fund, shielded from public scrutiny.

Money and Politics

Rhonda Sewell recently said, in regard to the museum’s new politically motivated DEAI plan (DIVERSITY, EQUITY, ACCESSIBILITY, AND INCLUSION), “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.”  As if the Toledo Museum of Art had ever been racist, until now.

UPDATE: adding here from my October 6, 2024 post about the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition — “It is interesting to note that Rhonda Sewell, who was initially hired in 2021 for the new post of “Belonging and Community Engagement Director” transitioned to another new bureaucratic museum post, that of “Director of Advocacy and External Affairs” in June 2023. This role is described as “forming and maintaining key relationships with legislators and policy makers at the local, state and federal levels.” Fascinating, since it was only a month before that the Ohio Attorney General embarked on an investigation of the Toledo Museum of Art regarding the circumstances surrounding the sale of three famous Impressionist paintings for $62 million in 2022 and the apparent breach of fiduciary duty by the trustees of the Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey endowments – the Libbeys being the museum founders.”

Along with collecting millions of dollars in taxpayer grants, that’s apparently how they handled my April 2023 complaint to the Ohio Attorney General. Obviously it worked. So I made another —

URGENT FOLLOW-UP: RECKLESS DISPOSITION OF TMA’S CORE ART COLLECTION

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Adam Levine’s Toledo Museum of Art

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 canon.” 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?