Tag: Libbey

Categories
Artists of Toledo

No flowers for the Libbeys this year

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

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

At the end of the post I wrote this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Museum paints a divisive narrative

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.

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Edward and Florence’s Wills

Why does the museum put flowers on the Libbey grave, three times a year, every year?

What reputable museum sells valuable paintings from their great French Impressionist collection to “broaden the narrative of art history?”

Selling off Paul Cezanne’s Clairière (The Glade); Henri Matisse’s Fleurs ou Fleurs devant un portrait; and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Nu s’essuyant simply makes no sense. These and other proven lasting works draw people to the museum from near and far. EDITORIAL – TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART SHOULD KEEP ITS TOP TIER   The Blade, Editorial Board, April 25, 2022 

Diversity is achieved through addition, not through subtraction. Removal of the works from the collection does nothing for diversity. There are ethical guidelines in the field that concern reasons for deaccession and increasing diversity is not among them. One could say that it’s performative rather than substantive. It looks like you’re doing something, when the question remains are you really doing something by taking great works of art out of a collection. – Christopher Knight, Pulitzer prize winning art critic and author of COMMENTARY: AN OHIO MUSEUM IS HOLDING THE BIGGEST SALE OF ARTWORK YET. IT’S UNCONSCIONABLE (Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2022), as quoted in the The Blade, Jason Webber, May 16, 2022, CONTROVERSY SURROUNDS TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART SALE OF THREE PAINTINGS

The Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey President, Director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art, Adam Levine, portrayed the Matisse, Cézanne, and Renoir paintings as being mediocre, disingenuously invoking Edward Drummond Libbey’s approval in a Libbey quote, as if Libbey would approve of the deaccessions of these valuable, famous and popular paintings. Mr. Levine wrote this in his April 8 deaccession justification letter to members: 

As Edward Drummond Libbey put it in 1912: “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.”

Mr. Levine said that deaccessions, such as that of these three masterpiece paintings, are written “by design” in the wills of Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey.

Twisting the intent of Edward and Florence’s wills, who by the way have paid for about 85% (just my BFA college-educated guess from looking at the museum’s online catalog) of all the art in the Toledo Museum of Art, as well as having paid for the building itself, their wills which stated that the proceeds of anything sold from the collection has to be spent on artwork only, is a basic ethical principle regarding the deaccessioning of artwork in any museum collection. But Adam Levine, 11th Director of the Toledo Museum of Art, made it seem as if Libbey intended for the art in the collection to be traded as if it was a stock portfolio! Indeed, Adam Levine told Christopher Knight in regard to selling the Cézanne, it was time to pull the trigger.

Adam Levine pulled the trigger on our famous Impressionist paintings and shot them out the door.
The rules in the wills

From the Edward Drummond Libbey Will:

All paintings, other pictures and works of art by me bequeathed said The Toledo Museum of Art, its successor and successors, by this my Will, or by any codicil thereto, and all paintings, pictures and other works of art by it or them acquired by expenditures from said income, shall at all times be properly and appropriately housed in one or more rooms of The Toledo Museum of Art in said City of Toledo, each of which rooms shall at all times be designated and plainly marked “The Edward Drummond Libbey Gallery”; each and every of said painting, other pictures and works of art shall at all times be plainly marked “Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey”, and shall be kept adequately insured against loss from fire, theft and other causes. Said The Toledo Museum of Art, its successor and successors, may temporarily loan for the purposes of public exhibition elsewhere any such painting or other picture or work of art, upon taking proper security for its safe return; and it and they may, from time to time and at its and their discretion, sell or exchange any painting or other picture or work of art purchased by expenditures from said income, and from the proceeds thereof may acquire some other or others.

From the Florence Scott Libbey Will:

One-half (1/2) thereof in the purchase of paintings, statuary, furniture and other works of art, each of which, when so acquired, shall have designated thereon, or near thereto, the following words: “Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott”, and shall be permanently installed in one or more rooms of the building or buildings of said Museum of Art, each of which shall be designated and known as the “Maurice A. Scott Memorial Gallery” and the other one-half (1/2), thereof to be used and expended by said The Toledo Museum of Art, its successor and successors, for any of its corporate purposes. Any articles, so purchased, if deemed advisable or desirable, may be sold or exchanged, and the proceeds of every such sale used as income in the purchase of some other work of art.

Building the museum’s fine collection took many years, and much effort went into it. French Impressionism is popular and valuable work; it is very accessible; it is considered to be the starting point of modern art. The Matisse (purchased in 1935) and Cezanne (purchased in 1942) were purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.

Adam Levine wrote in his April 8 letter to museum supporters:

The Toledo Museum of Art has never sought to have multiple examples by the same artist—fewer than 11% of the artists in our collection are represented by two or more paintings;  

We will use these proceeds to create a new acquisition endowment.

YIKES!

using the sales of the Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir to create a new acquisition endowment!! But doesn’t the Libbey will specify that proceeds from any sale be used for art, right now, not to be used to create a new entity of a new endowment — the money is not even going back to the Libbey Endowment to be used on art soon enough? What about the Libbey name and attribution to the gift of the artwork that will be purchased? What about Mrs. McKelvy? What the heck! What’s the set-up cost going to be for this “new endowment” and how many hands are in that pot?

Gee Wiz!

If only Adam Levine had been fired on the spot after he came out with his crude George Floyd memo that stated how the staff should stay neutral. Instead, the museum trustees went along with his rationalization that there was something fundamentally wrong with our museum, as if it reflects bias and discrimination against the black community. Nothing could be further from the truth, except for the hiring of Adam Levine and keeping him on after he published his thoughtless memo.

A field day

The Toledo Black Artist Coalition had a field day.

November 18, 2020, five months before she was hired by the museum to be the first “Director of Belonging and Community Engagement,” Rhonda Sewell’s heart emoji on a Toledo Black Artist Coalition Facebook post, implying that the Toledo Museum of Art is elitist and racist. It is important to note that the painting by Philip Guston in this post does not have anything to do with the Toledo Museum of Art. 
“On Monday, January 17th the Toledo Museum of Art is open as a gathering place to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Come enjoy a full day of programs and exhibits that celebrate African-American artists and culture. Feel the united spirit of our diverse Toledo community.”

This year, the museum opened its doors on a Monday for the first time in 110 years to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It just happened to be the 110th anniversary of the day the museum opened the doors for the very first time, ever. But there was no mention of that at the museum. Mum was the word. I was there, and I asked several employees, including a trustee who was going around introducing herself, and none of them knew. The museum historian knew though — they called and asked her! Couldn’t the museum figure out how Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the 110th anniversary of the opening of the new museum could be celebrated together? How pathetic that they had to sell out the museum’s history in order to honor black history.

“Belonging and Community Engagement” Director Rhonda Sewell’s January 19, 2022 tweet – a selfie with one of her favorite pieces of art – the Renoir sculpture of a nude woman in bronze that was deemed to be so similar and so much better than the Renoir painting of the nude white woman, that the painting had to go.
The two so-called “similar” late-period Renoirs. A painting that is too similar to a sculpture! Guess which on the Toledo Museum of Art chose to keep. What is the museum telling us? Its value on the open market was merely 5% of the total of the three, and this painting was a valuable part of Mrs. McKelvy’s female-eye-curated collection bequest. Was it thrown in as a symbolic sacrifice, or as a distraction? Will details be revealed that make it even more sinister than we can imagine? Read on….
April 26, 2022: What will next year bring? A museum without its venerable French Impressionist collection. A divisive museum. If that is Rhonda Sewell’s idea of progress, then congratulations.
The “brand” of “belonging”

Is it good stewardship for the Director of The Toledo Museum of Art, Adam Levine, to add two new departments — “Branding” and “Belonging” – erasing and re-writing the museum for the black community (some would call it pandering), while at the same time dismantling the museum’s wonderful French Impressionism collection for $50+ million? Adam Levine has ridded us of a good third or more of our valuable, popular, historically significant French Impressionist paintings, calling it in the name of “diversity.” One thing is for sure, he is getting a lot of negative publicity.

And then there’s this.

To sell our Renoir, Matisse and Cézanne out from under our valuable public collection, into secret, private hands, only for us to find out that the two most expensive paintings were sold to the same buyer, sales that are shrouded by the convenient secrecy of a Sotheby’s auction, then to discover a casino connection to our former “interim” director, John Stanley… who strangely became the museum spokesman for The Blade’s article on May 16, 2022, CONTROVERSY SURROUNDS TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART SALE OF THREE PAINTINGS saying that, basically, what do those people who object to the deaccessions know about art anyway, and “this is the world we live in….” It’s outrageous!

Hired to oversee the business aspects of the 2018 plans for the museum building renovation, then used as the interim director when Brian Kennedy suddenly left the museum one year before the end of his contract, John Stanley isn’t on the board of museum trustees, but for some reason, he is on the so-called “Art Committee” that recommended the deaccession (even though he has no degree in art – only in business and finance, and was hired by the museum to work on the new construction – so what does he know about art?) But when the going got tough with the public outcry against the auction, John Stanley was the spokesman the art museum put out front to deal with it.

And speaking for the museum on Facebook was the charming troll-like, aptly-named “Brandi Black.” She appeared on top of every Blade article about the deaccession, and also on my Toledo Now page, posting sarcastic ad hominem and name-calling attacks on everyone who dared to question the sales of the paintings. She used the face of Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Not everyone would recognize the honorable judge’s friendly face. Judges are meant to be behind the scenes, after all. They are not celebrities. “Brandi Black” changed her Facebook moniker picture to Ketanji Brown Jackson (from a white cartoon face) on the day before Adam Levine announced the deaccession. Hmmm…. Did the museum actually hire her, or was she just volunteering? Only the Brand Director knows for sure. Either way, she certainly made the museum look bad!

How strange that Brandi Black’s May 18 comment on The Blade Facebook post for their article, CONTROVERSY SURROUNDS TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART SALE OF THREE PAINTINGS, mentions 12 Monets, John Stanley and the Museum of Fine Arts, and that Brandi Black personally watched the Sotheby’s auction — all at once!
What are the odds?

Check out this article about the rental of 21 Monet paintings to a Las Vegas casino by the Institute of Fine Arts, Boston, during the time that John Stanley was the COO of that museum.

A museum’s stellar Impressionist collection rented out to a casino!!

How interesting to find out that John Stanley was the COO at the Institute of Fine Arts, Boston when they rented out 21 French Impressionist Monet paintings from the museum’s stellar collection to a Las Vegas casino, the Bellagio, for a generous rental fee.

The owner of the Bellagio casino, Steve Wynn, is an avid collector of French Impressionist art; such articles are easy to find on Google.

Is it possible that the sale of our valuable French Impressionist paintings could have been prearranged?

The Libbeys lost a child – a baby boy – in 1895. After that, they poured their hearts into making a great, democratic art museum for all of the people of the city of Toledo – it’s our inheritance. It’s our museum.
It’s our museum!

The trustees are expected to be good stewards of our museum. The least they can do is to take care of our art and heritage and not sell it off. Our museum is not to be used as a catalog of artwork for sale. After this deaccession tragedy, shouldn’t we be seriously safeguarding our multiple Rembrandt and van Gogh oil paintings and other valuable paintings from being casualties of a future corrupt deaccessioning, now that we know that such a travesty is not only possible, but suspiciously probable, considering the circumstances surrounding the loss of our three valuable French Impressionist paintings this month?

P.S.

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

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

P.P.S.

And what have they done to the Ward M. Canaday Gallery? There are no exhibitions in it anymore — they’ve had a movie playing in it for the past eight months. Are they going to sell the name of the gallery (their 2018 renovation construction plan illustrations replace the space with a generic name, capitalized, “Center Gallery”) to a philanthropist for a period of time until death puts the patron cold in the grave, at which time the museum will rinse and repeat? Will the Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery be at risk, as well? Is this part of Mr. Levine’s big money-making, blood-sucking, self aggrandizing plan to make our museum the envy of every museum in America?

The Toledo Museum of Art used to be the envy of every museum in America before the trustees diminished its great children’s art classes that served the entire Toledo area school system. Over 2,000 children of all ethnicities, chosen by the schools’ principals with recommendations from teachers, choosing children for the program on the merit of the child’s apparent proclivity for artistic creativity, attended art classes every Saturday during the school year, for nearly the entire 20th century. The Libbeys’ wills actually mention more in regard to the importance of education than they speak of art.

Not to mention that the museum killed the 96-year old tradition of the annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition and got rid of the exhibition’s purchase award collection at the Toledo Museum of Art, banishing it to a closet in a Toledo high school. Included in the collection are works by such diverse local artists as Marvin Vines and Robert Garcia. Maybe the Director of Belonging and Community Engagement ought to look into this closet collection and bring the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition back. The Canaday Gallery seems to be readily available.

All the museum has to do to make itself enviable again is look back on its own history of how it engaged the community – check down in that memory hole and pull it back up.

The bodies are still warm.

A timeline journal of articles and events surrounding the deaccession:

Toledo Museum of Art’s Controversial Unconscionable Tragic High-Profile Deaccessions