Edward Drummond Libbey (left) and Ibrahim Mahama (right). Composite image created for editorial commentary on cultural stewardship and institutional legacy.
What Toledo Is Losing: Stewardship Across Time
I find myself comparing Edward Drummond Libbey and Ibrahim Mahama. I began thinking about Ibrahim Mahama because my family’s work is currently part of an exhibition in one of the cultural spaces he has created in Ghana. More than a century apart, the two men each represent a different vision of how culture is built and sustained.
Ibrahim Mahama: Building for a Future He Will Not See
Ibrahim Mahama is a Ghanaian artist whose work engages collective memory and historical narratives deeply rooted in Ghana’s past and present. He has described his practice as a form of “time travel.” Internationally celebrated, Mahama has chosen to turn the profits of the global art market back into his home region of northern Ghana—building studios, research centers, archives, and public cultural spaces that serve artists and communities far beyond his own career.
Mahama’s work is often discussed in terms of materials, but its most consequential dimension may be institutional. Rather than withdrawing from Ghana after achieving international success, he has reinvested directly in place. His cultural spaces preserve memory, support research, and provide infrastructure for artists and the community.
Mahama does not dismantle cultural memory in order to innovate. He adds to it. His institutions are long-term civic commitments meant to outlast his own presence. They are built on the assumption that continuity itself has value.
Seeing what Mahama is building in Ghana made me reconsider what Toledo once understood a museum to be.
Edward Drummond Libbey and the Civic Ideal of the Museum
More than a century earlier, Edward Drummond Libbey made a remarkably similar decision. At the height of his success in the glass industry, Libbey endowed the city of Toledo with something radical for its time: a free, educational art museum meant to belong to the entire community. From its founding, the museum was free and educational, and civic at its core. It offered year-round Saturday art classes for children, college students, and adults. For nearly a century, it hosted the annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, a cultural touchstone that brought the local artist community together and helped launch countless careers.
Along the way, curators assembled an encyclopedic collection of art from around the world. The majority of the museum’s most valuable works were either gifted by the Libbeys or acquired through endowments they established. Edward Drummond Libbey and his wife, Florence Scott Libbey, articulated a clear governing principle: for every dollar spent on administration, an equal dollar should be spent on art. This balance was meant to keep the institution grounded in its purpose.
For much of the twentieth century, the museum thrived under long-serving directors who built steadily on this foundation. The Toledo Museum of Art was widely regarded as a model democratic institution—without having to announce itself as one.
Mahama reinvests success back into the community that produced it.
Libbey endowed permanence so art would remain available to those who lived with it. Different eras, different methods — the same ethic.
Continuity: How Stewardship Actually Works
Stewardship is the promise that what one generation builds, the next will care for and carry forward.
Cultural stewardship is slow. Its effects accumulate quietly over decades, often unnoticed while they are happening. Institutions like museums do not shape people through spectacle, but through repetition and presence—by being there year after year, generation after generation.
I understand this not only as an observer, but as a product of that system. I grew up with the Toledo Museum of Art as a civic constant, taking classes there from childhood through college. Art was not presented as exceptional or exclusive; it was simply part of life. That continuity mattered. It shaped how I understood art and culture as shared civic goods. Today, my work appears internationally, in an exhibition at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Ghana built by Ibrahim Mahama. That connection clarified something for me: Libbey’s legacy was never just a building or a collection. It was people.
What changes when art stops belonging to a place
and starts working for an institution?
Stewardship vs. Leverage
What we are seeing now treats legacy as something to be leveraged.
Leveraging art is part of the museum’s 2021 Strategic Plan – “TMA’s exhibitions will depart Toledo to traverse the globe, providing the Museum and its hometown the visibility it once enjoyed.” As Adam Levine stated to The Blade in 2022, “now we have a cultural shift and a new framework for how we can leverage this extraordinary collection to service the community.”
Dozens of masterworks — many long understood as highlights of the museum — have been removed from Toledo’s walls and sent abroad. Toledoans lose access, continuity, and presence, while the institution gains visibility, prestige, and philanthropic reach elsewhere. Whether or not these arrangements are called loans, they function like renting out the collection — converting Toledo’s inheritance into institutional capital.
This shift has been accompanied by a new level of opacity. At a December town hall, the director refused to disclose the total cost of the museum’s reinstallation. “The benefit of being private,” Adam Levine stated, “is that I don’t have to answer that question.”
With the collection built over more than a century through Libbey endowments and local stewardship, worth many orders of magnitude more than the physical systems used to justify its absence, the museum is undergoing a complete transformation, right down to the physical studs. It’s not merely a change in exhibition strategy, it’s a change in ethics. A museum founded on the principle that art should stay, teach, and belong now treats mobility as virtue and absence as acceptable. The people of Toledo are asked to trust – without transparency – that this leveraging of their inheritance will serve them.
Frank, a museum guard at the Glass Pavilion, 2014
Stewardship Includes Labor
Tourists [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.” – 2021 Strategic Plan.
The irony.
For generations, the museum guards at the Toledo Museum of Art were not simply security. They were trained, knowledgeable, and deeply embedded in the daily life of the museum — often serving as the most human point of contact between Toledoans and their art.
Longtime interpreters and art ambassadors, the replacement of museum guards with a third-party contract service signals another quiet shift: away from relational knowledge and toward transactional presence.
Additionally, “visitor services” workers at the entrances are being replaced by kiosks. Labor is increasingly treated the way the collection is: something to be optimized, externalized, and leveraged.
When a museum distances itself from its workers, it distances itself from its public. And when labor becomes peripheral, the institution risks hollowing out the very relationships that once made it matter.
The Central Question
Would Edward Drummond Libbey have wanted his museum dismantled, its masterworks dispersed, and its educational core deemphasized and long-time workers replaced in the name of reinvention?
And how would Ibrahim Mahama feel if the cultural institutions he is building today were stripped of their purpose a century from now and repurposed into something unrecognizable?
The most radical act a cultural institution can take is not reinvention but continuity—honoring the trust placed in it by the past while making room, carefully and responsibly, for the future.
These two men belong to very different moments in history, but both understood that culture does not sustain itself. It survives only when someone decides it is worth building — and worth protecting. The question for Toledo is what kind of stewardship it now believes in.
Mahama builds so culture can endure where it is made. Libbey endowed a museum so art would belong to the people who lived with it. That is the standard Toledo was given. And it is the standard against which this moment should be measured.
Within five years, changes were made at great speed—resulting in mass removals of artwork, off-site storage across the country, and a wholesale transformation of the museum’s physical space. I have documented this sequence here:
Fortune Magazine 1938: To Edward D. Libbey’s art museum – his enchantment draws 2,500 children every Saturday and 104 per cent of the population of Toledo in a year.Education was the central mission throughout the entire Twentieth Century.Map of Toledo (light gray) and the greater Toledo area (green) that the museum has always served compared to the circled two-mile radius of audience the focus for the reimagined museum.A student of the first photography class offered in the children’s Saturday classes, photographing in the Impressionist Gallery with Cezanne, Renoir and Van Gogh, 1979.In 2022, our three famous French Impressionist paintings by Matisse, Renoir Cezanne were taken off the wall and sold for $59 Million. And that was just the beginning.The Glass Pavilion, which opened in 2006, was built expressly to house the renowned glass collection. It will now be used for a different purpose.Headlines from 95 years of the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, which ended in 2014.The Cloisters, installed in the museum in 1930_, was closed on Feb. 2, 2025 to be dismantled and moved two galleries over, next to the Ancient Court, as to compress time as art is arranged chronologically.Poets Bob Philips, Nick Muska and Joel Lipman before a poetry reading at the Cloisters, Toledo Museum of Art, 1979 and a reshoot in 2015.The heavy words of Toledo Museum of Art’s inspirational word cloud shown at their symposium, Expanding Horizons: New Approaches in Display and Interpretation, July 20232024: The art museum is renovating. Glass art will be interspersed amongst other artwork in the main building, arranged chronologically. The Impressionist paintings have already been relocated to the Glass Pavilion. UPDATE: Feb. 7, 2025 — they are lending 57 of the impressionist and 20th century core art collection to New Zealand, and according to New Zealand, it’s because the museum is renovating! But they had already moved these paintings to the Glass Pavilion, built in 2006 — are they also renovating THAT building? Yes.A schematic rendering of how the museum will look, shown to the public in November 2024. It was not received well.The closure of the museum, 2025 – 2026 – 2027, in order to renovate “right down to the studs” and rearrange the collection chronologically. Art is being sent to art storage rooms across the country.Some of the 57 Impressionist – 20th Century masterworks that were lent to museums in New Zealand and Australia in 2025 and 2026.These 144 post-Civil War paintings were off view by April 2025.The Crowning of St. Catherine, Peter Paul Rubens, 1631, Brian Kennedy standing in front of it on August 26, 2011, at the opening of the 93rd Annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition. Brian Kennedy left abruptly in 2019, 18 months before the end of his contract.The Crowning of St. Catherine taken down in December 2025. Photo: Toledo Museum of ArtThe Great Gallery, dismantled in December 2025. Photo: Toledo Museum of Art. Where did the art go? To art storage rooms across the country. You might see some of your favorites when it opens again in late-2027, but then, you might not ever see your favorites again.
Meanwhile, at the SCCA in Tamale, Ghana…
Museum of Modern Art curator Smooth Nzewi looking into our collaborative generational project, “The Beyond,” at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana. My daughter’s Vertigo Cube features peepholes to the past – Victorian interiors photographed by my great great grandfather in 1894. Photo: SCCAAmong our 21 photos on display at Ibrahim Mahama’s Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana is my photo of the implosion of the Toledo’s Jeep Administration Building on April 14, 1979.
The perspective offered here emerges from long-term observation, archival research, and a lifelong relationship with the Toledo Museum of Art. Photos @Penny Gentieu unless otherwise attributed.
Perhaps Toledo’s greatest artist of all, for what she created and gave to the people of Toledo
some works of art that Florence Scott Libbey contributed to the Toledo Museum of Art, and works bought with funds from her bequest in memory of her father, Maurice A. Scott
The Architect’s Dream, 1840. Thomas Cole (American (born England), 1801-1848), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1949.162
If it wasn’t for Florence Scott Libbey, there would be no Toledo Museum of Art. The land it’s built on, the building, the additions, and most of the artwork in the museum is a gift of Florence Scott Libbey and her husband, Edward Drummond Libbey. She gave the gift of art to all Toledoans. She ensured that the museum would always be free, so that people from all walks of life could benefit from the collection of high quality art and the performance of great music in an outstanding Peristyle theatre in the East Wing.
Early Pilgrims of New England Going to Worship, George Henry Boughton (American, 1833-1905), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1957.30
Florence Scott was born on January 11, 1863, in Castleton-on-Hudson, Rensselaer County, New York to Mary Brown Messinger and Maurice Austin Scott, who was born on September 23, 1830, in Ridgefield, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Florence comes from a long line of fierce Puritans, non-conformists who had the strength and gumption to pull up their roots in England in search of religious freedom. They arrived in the New World to build a better life, as hard and challenging as it was. They were pioneers. Six generations lived in Fairfield county, Connecticut, before they migrated to Ohio in the early nineteenth century. Florence’s grandparents, Jesup and Susan Wakeman Scott and sons Maurice, Frank and William contributed greatly to the development of the brand new city of Toledo. Toledo is profoundly fortunate for all that they contributed, including several city parks, the University of Toledo, and the Toledo Museum of Art.
Starrucca Viaduct, 1865. Pennsylvania, Jasper Francis Cropsey (American, 1823-1900), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1947.58Roman Newsboys, 1848. Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819-1904), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1953.68
In 1835, Jesup Scott purchased the land on which the museum would later stand in 1912. Over the years, the close-knit extended family lived in Maumee, Connecticut, and Castleton-on-Hudson, which is where Florence was born and raised. Florence’s uncle Frank Scott was an architect and world traveler, possibly explaining where Florence got her sophistication and love of art. She went to finishing school in Germany. In the 1880’s the Scotts moved into a new house built at 2449 Monroe St. marking the precise location that would soon enough be the entrance to the museum.
Across the Salt Marshes, Huntington, abt 1905. Edward Jean Steichen (American, 1879-1973), Gift of Florence Scott Libbey, 1912.4Auvers, Landscape with Plough, 1872-1877. Charles-François Daubigny (French, 1817-1878), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 2015.18The Sickle, 1962. Jim Dine (American, born 1935), Gift of Florence Scott Libbey, by exchange. 2004.84A-BRooks in a Field, 1891. Laurits Andersen Ring (Danish, 1854 – 1933), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott and with funds given in memory of Sarnoff A. Mednick, 2016.13Still Life with Oranges, 1818. Raphaelle Peale (American, 1774-1825), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1951.498Village Tavern, 1813-1814. John Lewis Krimmel (American, 1786-1821), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1954.13Scene from Spenser’s “Fairie Queene”: Una and the Dwarf, 1827. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1951.295
I should mention here that in 1888 Edward Drummond Libbey moved his glass plant to Toledo from Cambridge, Massachusetts after meeting Florence at a dinner party. They were married on June 24, 1890 at Florence’s home, the spot of the future museum. It was the social event of the season. Florence and Edward were not royalty, they were in fact everyday people, but because their hearts were big and they could do, and did do, so much good for the people of Toledo, they were elevated to the highest level of greatness that Toledo has ever seen. And rightly so. When Mayor Carty Finkbinder initiated the Toledo Civic Hall of Fame in 1998, guess who was the first inductee?
Italian Landscape, 1814. Washington Allston (American, 1779-1843), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1949.113
Founded in 1901 with other like-minded citizens including artists, the museum opened in 1903 in a house provided by the Libbeys on the corner of Madison and 13th Street. Right away the museum was integrated into the community. Art classes began right away, including weekly children’s classes with 50 children. Later, after the white-marble museum was built on land donated by Florence, the School of Design was opened in an adjacent house on the property that was the former house of Florence’s uncle William. They had classes in drawing, painting, photography, pottery, needlework, lettering and home decoration. The museum gave hundreds of lectures a year and was a hot-bed of activity, designed “to bring our citizens the understanding of the principles and the benefits of art in their lives and in their work.” (Edward Drummond Libbey, 1921) The mission was both art education and the safe-keeping and exhibition of art. Then, during the Depression, the Peristyle was built, which employed countless Toledoans, thanks to the kindness and generosity of Florence Scott Libbey. She ensured in her will that the museum be free for everybody in perpetuity, and that the musical performances would be free or affordable for all walks of life.
Madonna and Child with Saints, probably 1759. Giambettino Cignaroli (Italian, 1706-1770), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1971.6Scene from Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” The Damsel and Orlando, 1793. Benjamin West (American, 1738-1820), Gift of Florence Scott Libbey, 1912.10The Washerwoman, abt. 1733-1739. Jean-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699-1779), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her
Father, Maurice A. Scott, 2006.2The Washerwoman, abt. 1733-1739. Jean-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699-1779), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her
Father, Maurice A. Scott, 2006.3Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape, Early 1620’s. Frans Hals (Dutch, ca. 1581 – 1666), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, and the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, Bequest of Jill Ford Murray, and Gift of Mrs. Samuel A. Peck, Mrs. C. Lockhart McKelvy, and Mr. and Mrs. Frederick S. Ford, by exchange, 2011.80Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble, 1990. Kerry James Marshall (American, born 1955), Purchased with funds from the Jamar Art Fund of Marvin and Lenore Kobacker, the Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Barber Art Fund, the Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund, and the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 2022.22
A note about the Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble –
Would Florence Scott Libbey like this little painting of a burnt American flag? Her ancestors helped build this country and fought in the American Revolution. Florence and Edward were upstanding American citizens who founded the museum. They would never burn a flag. Is the museum trying to make a point here? The museum also used funds from the Kobackers and the Barbers, who fought under the flag in World War II. This little scribble of Kerry James Marshall’s is hardly one of his best — it was not in his 2016 retrospective of about 100 of works at the Met. It was owned by the father of a Brooklyn Museum curator with whom the Toledo Museum was planning a Nigerian art show for the Summer of 2023. It was bought from an Ohio art dealer who listed it at an art fair in April 2022. The next year, the museum accepted a donation of a large number of prints from this same art dealer. An iconic Kerry James Marshall painting for the museum would have been nice, especially since they just sold three iconic Impressionist paintings for diversity sake making $61M. The former contemporary art curator wrote on Instagram that this painting would be used in their programs. Perhaps because it fits in a spiral bound notebook and is easy to carry to the museum’s new offsite art classes in the Projects, to condescendingly show the fledgling art students that the Art Museum bought this painting of a black man in a world of trouble. See, he burned the flag. So please come to the museum.
Head of an Old Man, about 1883. Frank Duveneck (American, 1848-1919), Gift of Florence Scott Libbey, 1923.19John Ashley, 1799. Gilbert Stuart (American, 1755-1828), Gift of Florence Scott Libbey, 1912.12Hester, Countess of Sussex, and Her Daughter, Lady Barbara Yelverton, 1771. Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727-1788), Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, and with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1984.20John Banister, 1798. Robert Feke (American, 1706/7-1752), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1945.16Mrs. Nathaniel Cunningham, 1730. John Smibert (American, 1688-1751), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1948.19Young Lady with a Bird and a Dog, 1767. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738-1815), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott, 1950.306Lisa Jean, 1987. Henry Speller (American, 1900 – 1997), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2021.28A Young Lady Named Georgia Alice Fixing to Get Married and Got on Her Wedding Dress, 1987. Georgia Speller (American, 1931 – 1988), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2021.27
A note about Lisa Jean, A Young Lady Named Georgia Alice Fixing to Get Married and Got on Her Wedding Dress, and the Souls Grown Deep
In 2019, the museum jumped on the nation-wide museum bandwagon to buy the self-taught art and quilts of a small community in Alabama from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The museum chose to further Florence Scott Libbey’s legacy by using her Bequest for many more pieces, see here. By buying these pieces from Souls Grown Deep, the museum agreed to their policy of resale rights, so it’s a financial arrangement as well. And note that every acquisition is not only purchased with the funds of Florence Scott Libbey in memory of her father, every one is also a gift of Souls Grown Deep.
What a wild contrast these works make for the collection of Florence Scott Libbey’s bequests. Would she like them? Or is her memory getting jerked around by the new leadership of the museum?
The School of Design has withered away to nearly nothing. While the museum bragged that it was “bursting out of the walls” with its classes in the Projects, the truth is that, for years, it had been quietly dismantling the real school — the one that served generations of everyday people. For decades, it was a respected, working institution with deep community roots and enormous potential for growth. But instead of nurturing that legacy, the museum shifted its focus. Today, its outreach is largely limited to its new pet demographic: Blacks living within the two-mile radius.
One thing is for sure, the portraits Florence bought for the museum have made much better artists of Toledoans. Toledo artists are particularly skilled at rendering the human form and capturing a likeness. For example, Leslie Adams, Chelsea Yonkman, Aaron Bivins, Michael Sheets, Richard Reed, Diana Attie to name a few. Ironically, the Libbeys started the local art shows at the museum, that Brian Kennedy, the museum’s 9th director, ended in 2014. The museum ridded itself of storing years of local artist purchase awards. As a result, this great collection of Toledo art has disintegrated into thin air. Then the museum buys this low quality self-taught folk art from a single region in the South. They have to build more storage just to store it — the sculpture, Trip to the Mountaintop, shown below, is 11 feet tall and 7 feet around. Adam Levine is quoted in a national publication that he is not only committed to showing these works, he’s committed to storing them too.
Woman Keeping Her Eye on What She Got, 2001. Thornton Dial (American, 1928-2016), Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2021.17Trip to the Mountaintop, 2004. Thornton Dial (American, 1928-2016), Gift of Arthur J. Secor, by exchange, purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2020.28
The Land Acknowledgment of 2023
The Toledo Museum of Art’s 2023 Land Acknowledgment after 122 years of Florence Scott Libbey’s continuous generosity:
The Toledo Museum of Art is located on the ancestral homelands of the Erie, Kickapoo, Ottawa, and Seneca. We recognize that many other native tribes have also conducted trade on and called this region their home including the Lenape, Miami, Ojibway, Peoria, Pottawatomie, Sauk, Shawnee, and Wyandotte. We at the Museum acknowledge and honor the past present and future lives of indigenous peoples in the Toledo area and thank them for their resilience as stewards of the land on which the Museum’s campus now resides.
Such a trendy token gesture, as if to apologize for the museum being built on the ancestral homelands of four separate native tribes, and the many others who roamed the region who also called it home. Is the museum going to give it back then? Rather thoughtless, too, because it fails to acknowledge the museum’s own ancestral donors who were the last of any people to live on the land on which the museum now resides. Does this glaring omission of recognition suggest that Florence Scott Libbey and her family did something wrong? Time will tell. They generously donated the land that made the museum possible, along with the art, the time, the leadership, and the money. They gave jobs to ingrates, like the ones who recite this overreaching yet insufficient land acknowledgment whenever they have a chance.
Likewise, on Martin Luther King Day in 2022, the museum opened on a Monday, believed to be the only Monday in its history to be open. It was also the 110th anniversary of the opening of the brand new white marble building of the Toledo Museum of Art. Did the museum celebrate that anniversary along with Martin Luther King Jr.? No way! They kept it secret. You have to wonder why the anniversary of the museum could not be celebrated on Martin Luther King Day. The museum has no pride? Self-hate? Or is it that they just can’t reconcile celebrating the both the Museum and Martin Luther King Jr. as if their purpose is directly opposed to the museum’s purpose? Perhaps they are not being good patrons of the museum?
As for respecting Florence Scott Libbey’s wishes for flowers to be put on the Libbey’s grave on Easter Day, Memorial Day and November 13, which is a requirement of the Endowment, (and it’s not really asking too much), just look at the unkept mess that was the Libbey grave on Easter Day in 2023!
The Museum was meant for everyone—free admission for “all conditions of life,” and musical performances were priced so anyone could attend. The school, the lectures, the art – it was a gift to the whole community, without barriers. That was the founding spirit of the museum: free and open to all, and they wanted everyone with them. They had to rebrand that?
Now, under Director Adam Levine, he talks of “problems with the beginnings of museums,” as if our museum shares the same legacy of elitism of other museums that he does not name. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Yet this flawed projection seems to justify what he calls a “complete transformation”—a revolution. Into what? We’re simply told we should want it. That we should love what he’s doing. That it will “put Toledo on the map.” As he sends our art away.
The new rebranding: the museum is now for all people, not just some. That message doesn’t honor the museum’s roots—it mocks the vision of Florence and Edward Libbey, who built this museum as a community center for education. A museum for everyone.
Off the Wall
It’s May 15, 2025 today as I write this page and none of these 144 iconic paintings are on view, most of these being the gifts of Edward Drummond Libbey —
The museum makes its own art now. Living off of its great reputation, it runs on fumes.
“The superpower that an art museum has is when something goes up on the wall, it’s considered good. We set the canon.” Adam Levine, 11th Director of The Toledo Museum of Art, quoted in a Forbes interview in 2022.
“Our audience is changing dramatically – our average age of a visitor has dropped by almost 20 years over the past four years, and our visitation is more diverse than the Metropolitan Statistical Area.” Adam Levine, City Paper May 9, 2025
DEI took over the museum and all of a sudden the museum is a condescending love-fest celebrating every holiday for Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and the disabled. Everyone else is expected to step aside (unless they are gay or mentally ill). Art is about identity politics now and the European art has to go.
These usurpers plan to transform the museum “right down to the studs.” They don’t have contractors lined up, they don’t know where the money is coming from, but they have already taken the post-Civil War European and American art off the walls.
“Our audience uses the museum as a place to expand their horizons – which is an incredible thing,” said Adam Levine, a New Yorker outsider who is now the 11th director of the museum (the 4th in the past 15 years.) He is ripping it apart as if it is a toy. He’s into surveys, checking everyone’s age, sex, race, religion and address, and the reason why they like to visit the museum. He found out that many different people in Toledo like to expand their horizons at the museum. As if it hasn’t been that way since the Libbeys built the museum for us. He can’t imagine other spaces where people of different backgrounds can come together and do such a thing. But Toledo even has a university (thanks to Florence Scott Libbey’s grandfather, Jesup Scott). People in Toledo of different backgrounds go to concerts too, they use the public library, and they even travel. And he thought we were dumb.
“Change is hard for people, especially when people are used to something,” said Levine, who must have paid a PR firm $100,000 for that line, using Libbey funds.
People don’t like having their art taken away that was given to them by Florence Scott Libbey and Edward Drummond Libbey, and they don’t like their heritage erased and replaced. We don’t want to be told how to think. We don’t want our great museum torn apart by outsiders who endeavor to make a global name for themselves, an “example for other museums to follow,” selling our art along the way. Museum stewards should care for the art and the museum to which they are entrusted, and not just use it for their hyperactive experiment.
Edward Drummond Libbey would be livid knowing what they are doing to their gift of an art museum meant for the people of Toledo — They gave it to all people, not just the few who live in a two-mile radius.
Libbey is a role model for capitalists. He gave back to the community. Many might argue that he should have given to the poor instead of building an art museum.
It is an old argument, but the world needs museums as much as it needs soup lines.
More importantly, how one gives back to the community is an individual matter in our society. Libbey was blessed that his passion for art, love of glassmaking, community vision, and hope in education came together in a single project. His focus was on children and education, which benefited society. Libbey approached philanthropy differently than most other capitalists. He wanted true community involvement in his giving. He didn’t just give Toledo an art museum, he made Toledans part of the building. He made the museum a community center for education. Art and industrial art education were part of the museum’s mission. Libbey found encouragement, not just in the number of visitors to the art galleries, but in the number of students enrolled in training at the museum. He even promoted visits by workers and industrial designers to infuse art and manufacturing into the curriculum.
The museum today remains a spiritual legacy to Edward Libbey. Walking through, you can sense his spirit and direction. The glass collection is a tribute to the glass industry, and a living example of the fusion of industry and art. The diversity of the collection is striking in itself and reflects the central role of art that Libbey envisioned. The museum is still inviting, as Libbey had envisioned. It is in every aspect an art museum for the average person.
––Quentin R. Skrabec, Jr. Edward Drummond Libbey, American Glassmaker, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011
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.
