Tag: Toledo Lucas County Port Authority

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Artists of Toledo

Open letter to Sara Jane DeHoff, Chair of the Board of the Toledo Museum of Art

The heavy words inspiring the reinstallation of the Toledo Museum of Art don't have much to do with art.

Subject: Urgent Follow-Up: Further Concerns Over TMA’s Disposition of Core Artworks and Lack of Transparency

Dear Ms. DeHoff,

I hope you are well. I am writing again as a deeply concerned citizen regarding the troubling decisions at the Toledo Museum of Art, and to follow up on my February 10 email—which, like my previous correspondence, has not received a response. I have reached out on numerous occasions, yet my genuine inquiries continue to be met with silence and, more recently, outright censorship.

I am particularly disturbed by recent developments regarding our museum’s core collection.

I recently learned through a news report from New Zealand that TMA is loaning 57 Impressionist and 20th-century paintings—many are gifts from Edward Drummond Libbey and are featured in the museum’s “Masterworks” book—to the Auckland Art Gallery while TMA’s building undergoes renovations.

What is especially ironic is that Auckland is currently celebrating the recent bequeath of the art collectors, Julian and Josie Robertson with an exhibition called “The Robertson Gift: Paths through Modernity” Feb 9, 2024 – Feb 1, 2026, a collection of 15 paintings valued at $190 million.

Yet by interjecting the TMA loan into the mix, the Auckland Gallery is, in effect, dwarfing the impact of the Robertson Gift, since just two or three paintings from the Toledo collection are worth more than the total Robertson bequest that Auckland professes to be so honored to be given, and the Toledo show, “A Century of Modern Art,” consists of 57 bigger, better paintings. 

Meanwhile, back in Toledo, the museum-going public is witnessing the shoving aside of the treasured Impressionist masterworks as the museum gets them out of sight, a core collection of gifts from Edward Drummond Libbey, and an important promise that has been broken.

Seems like all around the world, the gifts of generous museum donors are being dishonored.

In 2022, the day Director Adam Levine announced the sale of the beloved three famous Impressionists paintings, in the very same email*, he promised museum supporters that the other Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir paintings would always remain on view on the museum’s walls. Now to send these paintings away under the guise of renovations when the museum boasts of 280,000 square feet of gallery space is a real betrayal, and alarms are going off that something is seriously wrong with the museum’s stewardship.

Moreover, when I asked the museum for the complete list of the 57 paintings, Adam Levine dismissed my request, telling me that “this information of course will be public domain since the works will be on display in New Zealand!” (That is, if I want to hire a detective.) He said that sharing the full list would “just be used to sensationalize” my concerns. I should be talking to him directly instead of talking about this publicly, he said, in an attempt to shut me up.

This total lack of transparency, the efforts of censorship, coupled with sudden actions by the museum make me wonder, will we ever see these Impressionist paintings hanging on the walls of the Toledo Museum of Art again? After all, in just a few short years, the museum has sold three paintings, moved the other paintings from the prominent galleries in the main museum to the Glass Pavilion across the street, and now is sending this large collection to the other side of the world without any announcement, leaving museum supporters to find out from a news article from New Zealand; bringing light to a broken promise and the museum’s total lack of transparency, all while the community is stunned over the closing of the Cloisters, and unbeknownst that the Impressionist paintings are on their way out. All of this underscores suspicion.

Considering that the museum is under the spell of DEI (DEAI) and promotes the idea that people want to see themselves on the walls, it seems that these French paintings have been banished because they are too European for the demographics of the two-mile radius of the museum that the museum is using to advance their radical DEI agenda. Maybe it’s all a guise to sell the valuable paintings, who knows?

Adam Levine certainly has minimized the importance of the Libbey Endowment to the museum by selling the three paintings in 2022 for $59 million and making a private fund out of the money. The museum has lost all credibility of being trustworthy – the one thing a museum must NEVER lose, as at the Toledo Museum of Art the current leaders are the custodians of the wonderful gift of cultural heritage that came from Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey.

It is telling is that at the very same time of the January 29 announcement in New Zealand that didn’t reach the Northern Hemisphere until a week later, TMA announced the closure of the Cloisters on January 30, with only three days’ notice, announcing it on Facebook, spurring hundreds of impassioned comments from the community.

The Cloisters, consisting of ancient columns, capitals, and arches that were sourced from 12th to 15th century medieval sites in southwest France to evoke a medieval monastery cloister, collected and permanently installed into the museum over the span of five years, was the highlight of the east and west wing expansion of 1933 and symbolizes the heart of the museum. It was just renovated and reopened in 2022. But now it’s excised and relegated to the far east wing next to the Ancient court, replacing four nice little gallery rooms, just so the museum can put everything in alphabetical, oh, that is chronological order, a conveyer belt style loop design forcing visitors to look at art through a specific political prism. It sounds frankly hideous; hardly an idea worthy of gutting the museum. Adam Levine plans to use what’s left of our superlative collection for his radical ideology that he plans to use to set as an example for all other museums to follow. 

Radical plan to gut museum was only revealed this month, February 2025

The plans to dismantle the beloved, fragile historic Cloisters and move it to the Wolfe Gallery were never publicly disclosed beyond whispers to select visitors and internal sketches shared with other museums at the 2023 symposium. And now, after the closure of the Cloisters, the museum states that the Cloisters will be moved to the footprint of the current Galleries numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6.

I ask that you ensure that our public heritage is not sacrificed at the whim of the current museum director who doesn’t seem to like the museum and wants to change everything about it, right down to the “physical studs” of the building itself, as he was quoted saying in a recent Channel 11 news article.

If our mission is to integrate art into the lives of people, then rehanging our collection is only half of the equation. The reinstallation offers us a chance to go back to the conceptual as well as the physical studs, rethinking the museum experience for the 21st century. We are developing exciting plans on this front that we believe can create different paradigms for engagement. –Adam Levine

There is nothing in the 2021 five-year plan about gutting the museum and redoing it down to the studs. Back in 2018 there were plans to renovate and money was collected for that but the plan seemed to be abandoned when the museum announced their five-year plan in 2021. What happened in-between was that the director Brian Kennedy resigned just one year short of his contract, leaving the museum in the lurch. After a year or two Adam Levine was hired. But right away Adam Levine made the blunder of telling people that the museum would stay neutral during the George Floyd demonstrations. Having to walk back his statement, ever since then the museum has been practicing self-flagellation — the DEI (DEAI) came in and made sweeping changes to the museum administration, adding layer upon layer of bloated bureaucracy, and here we are now, at the sacrificial alter offering up our entire museum, the gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, witnessing it becoming a shadow of its once self.

A collection created by donor funds and connoisseurship collecting, now it’s done by identity politics, federal dollars, and the turning of the back on the founders by a director who stated publicly in a 2022 Forbes interview:

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

Levine sold a Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir with the excuse that the museum never intended to have multiple examples by the same artist in their collection. But that is not true. I researched it – see my list of multiple paintings by the same artist; of the roughly 800 or more paintings in the TMA collection in 2022, 57 are by the same artist. Collecting these paintings was clearly intentional.

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; masterpieces by Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir will remain regularly on view on our walls. –Adam Levine

He cut ties with the founder Edward Drummond Libbey by selling gifted paintings for $59 million and not putting that money back into the Libbey Endowment but instead into a private fund. (see, April 8, 2022 email to museum supporters.)

The three paintings being sold will provide the Museum with more than $40 million, greater than the total corpus of the current Libbey Funds supporting our art purchases. We will use these proceeds to create a new acquisition endowment –Adam Levine

Contrary to this statement made in the Feb. 8, 2024 Toledo Free Press article, Patrons pay tribute to Cloister Gallery, he IS using taxpayer funds to put the wrecking ball to the museum that we know and love.

The museum did not provide details about the cost for moving The Cloister. The spokesperson wrote that TMA is privately funded and the project is one small part of the larger reinstallation that is being funded through individual and corporate philanthropy. –Doreen Cutway, museum spokesman and senior public relations manager

The museum went to the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, the President and CEO of which is also the Secretary of the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors, Thomas Winston, 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 was asked 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.

The museum has received many millions of dollars from Ohio and from the federal government in recent years, all grants are public record on the corresponding Ohio and federal websites. Grants that are hurting the fundamentals and founding principles of the museum.

The museum is probably taking advantage of the generous NEA Arts & Artifacts Indemnity Program to insure our 57 artworks for a billion dollars or more to send them off to New Zealand. Otherwise the loan wouldn’t be feasible. And if that program is stopped, in the current political environment while our paintings are abroad? Oh well, it’s mostly the work of old white men anyway.

As I noted above, in asking for the complete list of 57 renowned paintings going to New Zealand, Adam Levine refused to share it, saying he was afraid that I would use it to sensationalize my concerns. What is left for me to sensationalize? Adam Levine has provided all the sensationalism himself already.

I respectfully urge you, as Chair of the Board, to address these issues publicly. The Toledo Museum of Art is a treasured institution built and endowed by the Libbeys as a gift to the people of Toledo, and decisions of this magnitude must be made with full transparency and not just pushed on community using tactics like censorship and gaslighting. I ask that you halt the destruction of the Cloisters, cancel the loan to New Zealand and rehang the Impressionist and 20th century paintings.  And then find new leadership that will provide proper stewardship and keep our museum intact.

Thank you for your time and attention to this critical matter. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Penny Gentieu

Again, I’d like to point out Adam Levine’s statements in his April 8, 2022 email about the sale of the Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir:

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; masterpieces by Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir will remain regularly on view on our walls.

For the record, here is a list of 16 of the 53 artists of the 57 artworks going to New Zealand, major works for which information has been released to the “public domain” as Levine put it, as reported in the Auckland press release.  The artists in bold have only one painting in the TMA collection. There are 37 other artists (4 artists have more than one artwork in the show) and the museum refuses to make those names public at this time. But with this list of 16 names only, it seems like the entire museum collection of Impressionist to Modernity may be shipped off. What would Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey think of that? What does the public think?

  1. Cezanne     
  2. Degas   
  3. Helen Frankenthaler   
  4. Édouard Manet 
  5. William Merritt Chase   
  6. Modigliani    
  7. Berthe Morisot     
  8. Monet  
  9. Pablo Picasso   
  10. Pissarro   
  11. Robert Rauschenberg     
  12. Renoir   
  13. Vincent van Gogh 
  14.  James McNeill Whistler   
  15. Gauguin    
  16. Mondrian

*Adam Levine rationalized the sale of the three impressionist paintings by saying that it was never the intention of the museum to have multiple examples of the same artist, that fewer than 11% of the artists in our collection are represented by two or more paintings; here is a list that I made of multiple paintings by the same artist. It’s obvious that the purchase of multiple paintings by the same artists was intentional.

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Artists of Toledo

Behold, The Dismantling of The Toledo Museum of Art

The art museum is renovating. Glass art will be interspersed amongst other artwork in the main building, arranged chronologically. They have already relocated, one year ago, the impressionist paintings 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, they say it’s because the museum is renovating! But they already had moved these paintings to the Glass Pavilion, built in 2006 — are they also renovating THAT building?

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 two-mile radius of the museum. They want to get them to come. They are trying everything. They must completely redo the museum.

They rebranded at great expense, creating a $200K operating deficit for 2023 (they spent much more than that). The redesigned logo looks like a gun scoping you out. It’s animated and dominating and goes back and forth tracking everything you look at. Don’t get in the way because it’s about to kill the artwork. Especially the American and European artwork because it’s not politically correct.

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. They don’t like that kind of culture even if it is great art. The amazing thing about a museum is that it has this amazing ability to say whatever the museum puts up on the walls – it’s instantly going to be great art. This is what the new director says after previous directors really did collect great art, which is what really made the Toledo Museum of Art so great. But the new guy replaced the connoisseurs with culture workers and lowered the bar. Because the museum sets the canon. Boom!

Instead of adding to the collection to create more diversity, he is subtracting from it, and the money’s good. They sold three French Impressionist paintings for 59 million dollars! They can get billions for all the irrelevant art they can subtract from the collection. Boom!

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 $30 million 18 years ago. But in hindsight that was a mistake and they will correct that — the fixers have arrived.

They are taking the glass collection out of the Glass Pavilion and it will be spread around the 2-D art in the main building, arranged chronologically. The Glass Pavilion will be for special exhibitions and to serve as the graveyard for Impressionist paintings, which have already been removed.

In place of the prominent Impressionist gallery that showed Impressionist art, they will install a display showing Toledo’s glass industry history and the history of the Museum. 

The museum’s campus-wide reinstallation is mostly led by employees and consultants who are brand new. The museum doesn’t bother to mention it in the five-year plan, nor in the 2023 annual report. That’s because they just thought of it. Spending as much money as they can, they hire numerous firms, consulting curators and simpatico fellows to help them, making sure that they are all from out of town.

The Chairman of the Board of the Museum, Sara Jane DeHoff, is thrilled that such noteworthy architects competed for the job, commenting to The Blade in the November 22 article, “I can’t tell you how many international designers applied for this project.” Who wouldn’t want the cushy job of an ambitious renovation and reinstallation from an ambitious museum with supposed unlimited funds?

According to the new architectural renderings, the redone museum will look like a hospital with a bad facelift. 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. People are not happy about it.

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.

They advanced 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 the dismantling the ancient tile floor and the taking apart of 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 Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery that was built for contemporary art.  It too was a mistake made by previous museum directors that the new people are going to fix now. Two million dollars towards the renovation of the former glass gallery that was made into a contemporary art gallery (mistakenly) was donated (stupidly) by Mary and Fritz Wolfe, who are both dead now.

Fritz Wolfe served 27 years on the Museum board and Mary Wolfe co-chaired the 100th anniversary celebration in 2001.

The new museum people don’t care about respecting 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. The Cloisters to be moved to where the new two-story Wolfe Contemporary gallery is now.

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.

It is very risky as well. Remember the disastrous fire of Notre Dame was caused by a mistake made during a renovation.

For Toledoans, including the Toledo Museum Board of Directors, if they don’t stop this disastrous dismantling of the museum we 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.

Why are Toledoans letting this happen to the museum that was meant for them?

See, here, for detailed research on the Cloisters move.
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Artists of Toledo

Art. Think about it.

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 $30 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.

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