Toledo Lucas County Port Authority

Why don’t they just build their own museum?

“Our visitors will see their histories on display,” so says the new director Adam Levine, who is from New York, as he and the former director John Stanley, also of New York, have their way with Toledo’s once and future

Toledo Museum of Art.

Famous Impressionist paintings thrown out the door.

The museum conducted surveys of all the people living in the 2-mile radius of the museum. They want to get them to come. They are trying everything.

They have to completely redo the museum. Enough with the European paintings that the Libbeys and others donated. That kind of art, that the museum was built on, does not speak to the people. And who cares that the new Glass Pavilion was designed by the famed Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa specifically for the glass art collection in 2006 for $35 million and that was only 18 years ago.

Instead, the museum is undergoing a campus-wide reinstallation and architectural renovation that they say will suit the neighborhood. They hired numerous firms to help them. According to an architectural rendering, it will look like a pot store. The walls are white and devoid of art, and on the floor are curvy glass display tables mazed throughout what looks to be the Great Gallery.

Imagine, The Crowning of Saint Catherine, considered to be the best painting by Peter Paul Rubens that is in America, the two paintings called Lot and His Daughters, one by Guercino and one by Artemisia Gentileschi, along with many others being taken off the walls of the Great Gallery. Oh yes they will.

The Impressionist paintings have already been removed.

They are taking the glass art out of the Glass Pavilion and will sprinkle it among the 2-D art in the main building, arranging the art chronologically. The Glass Pavilion will be for special exhibitions and to serve as the graveyard for Impressionist paintings.

They spread the rumor that they were getting rid of the Cloisters, only to let it leak that they are just moving the Cloisters. To a smaller area behind the the ancient art. Imagine dismantling the ancient tile floor and the delicate and very old four walls of columns, all related in history, that form the Cloister gallery. It will never look or be the same.

To find a spot for the Cloisters, they will dismantle the 12-year old Wolfe Gallery that was built for contemporary art. The funds for the million-dollar renovation of the former glass gallery to be made into a contemporary art gallery were donated by Mary and Fritz Wolfe, who are both dead now.

They don’t care about disrespecting donors. They get their money from the government now.

Museum floor plan in 2014, note the purple + bright blue will be moved to the orange galleries — the museum’s greatest paintings, European, Renaissance now hanging in the Great Gallery and adjacent galleries getting shoved aside, in a much smaller area.

Sketch presented by the museum to other museums at the symposium they sponsored in the summer of 2023.

So much for the stewards of the art museum and their fiduciary duty to care for the art so that it is passed on to future generations of Toledoans. Adam Levine, a financial crypto specialist, sees the future of museums as being “screen-based.” He is not the best person to be put in charge of caring for and keeping the art and the art museum, let alone to be given the right to remodel it, in his experiment to inspire other museums.

“Our visitors will see their histories on display.” In the freshly painted white galleries, they will be installing new benches and Wi-Fi.

For Toledoans, including the Toledo Museum Board of Directors, if they don’t stop this disastrous dismantling of the museum they love, the history being made now will leave them with a pathetic legacy, and will leave the city with the loss of what made it so good.

Contact the board members of the Toledo Museum of Art if you agree with me.

This is a photo of the Libbey grave on Easter 2023 showing that the museum left it in tatters in spite of the directive of the Libbey Endowment. The Libbeys are the founders of the museum.

If the museum needs to make repairs to its HVAC system, and it doesn’t have the money in its own operating funds, why doesn’t it take more money from the Libbey endowment? If the museum can’t find enough money in the Libbey endowment because the Endowment requires that 50% needs to be spent on art, why not do a fundraiser? If the museum can’t raise enough money from a fundraiser, why doesn’t it apply for grants? If the museum still can’t raise enough money to repair the HVAC system from the endowment, fundraisers and grants and its own operating funds, why doesn’t the museum apply for a loan from a bank?

These are fair questions. Instead, the museum went to the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, asking them to install “port authority facilities” into the museum in the form of an HVAC system. The port authority eagerly agreed and posted a bond for the museum as a part of their .4 mill operating levy that was passed by voters on November 5. More money came from the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and the Columbus-Franklin County Finance Authority for the total of $24.89 million for a new HVAC system. Pretty slick.

The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority owns and operates “port authority facilities” such as the Port of Toledo, Toledo Shipyard, Toledo Express Airport, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza train station, ParkSmart Parking Facilities, General Cargo Terminals. And now the port authority is adding one more “port authority facility” to this governmentally controlled list — the HVAC system at the Toledo Museum of Art. The port authority approved a $25 million bond, together with the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and the Columbus-Franklin County Finance Authority, then approved by taxpayers, the constructing, developing, equipping, improving, and installing “port authority facilities” across the 328,568 square foot museum.

Interestingly, the Secretary of the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors, Thomas Winston, is also the President and CEO of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. The Vice Chair of the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors, Sharon Speyer, is on the Board of Directors of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, among other interested parties, including a banker.

Now the big question is, where is the money coming from for the rest of the “improvements,” “remodeling” and “reinstallation” for the newly planned “facelift” of the Toledo Museum of Art, as every gallery gets remodeled and painted white, and the recently renovated Cloister gallery gets disassembled and moved to the east, and new technologies get installed in every gallery, and all of the art gets shifted around and arranged chronologically? The Glass Pavilion, which cost $35 million to build in 2006, will be repurposed as the glass gets removed and scattered among the art in the main building arranged by date. What is it going to cost, and what will the museum have to do for that? Are they going to sell their soul, as they have already let the port authority claim “port authority facility” ownership to infiltrate the very air they breath? Do people need or want this radical change?

And the even bigger question is, how much great art that the public loves will fall through the cracks during this seismic shift?

Remember the sale of the three French Impressionist paintings for $62 million in 2022, and the promise for new art, which never happened. And then the removal of all the rest of the Impressionist paintings to a back room of the glass museum.

Art. think about it. Is it inevitable that the last bastion of freedom and independence and great wealth in Toledo, the freedom of art, will get gobbled up by the turkeys?

They just can’t seem to get enough.