{"id":79225,"date":"2025-10-14T05:25:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T05:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/79225\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T05:25:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T05:25:13","slug":"toledo-museum-of-art-director-on-digital-art-ai-and-future-proofing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/79225\/","title":{"rendered":"Toledo Museum of Art Director on Digital Art, AI, and Future-Proofing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn the five or so years since taking the reins as director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art<\/a>, Adam Levine has helped the Ohio institution become a case study in how to adapt to the digital age. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to growing the museum\u2019s operating budget from $15 million to $23 million and expanding its endowment by $90 million, he launched TMA Labs, an in-house consultancy designed to help Toledo innovate around data, Web3, AI, and other emerging technologies. That work has led to acquisitions of digital art (from NFTs to digital numismatics), a digital artist-in-residence program, and \u201cInfinite Images<\/a>,\u201d an exhibition tracing the long history of computer and digital art, on view through November.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Painting<\/p>\n

\n\tAt just 38 years old, Levine is one of the youngest museum directors in the US\u2014a fact that shows most clearly in his enthusiasm for novel ways to engage audiences and future-proof his institution. ARTnews spoke with Levine over Zoom to discuss the evolution of TMA Labs, which is now led<\/a> by Ian Charles Stewart, a cofounder of Wired magazine; the opening of \u201cInfinite Images\u201d; and how he is preparing the museum for a future in which personalization is as expected in museums as it is in online shopping.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe interview below has been edited for clarity and concision.<\/p>\n

\n\tARTnews: You\u2019ve said museums shouldn\u2019t just pivot online but rethink what they\u2019re for. How has that process unfolded in Toledo, especially with the launch of TMA Labs and \u201cInfinite Images\u201d?<\/p>\n

\n\tAdam Levine: The Toledo Museum of Art was founded in 1901 and has long focused on acquiring superlative artworks\u2014artworks of singular aesthetic merit, not encyclopedism. We seek to have individual objects that are exquisite regardless of medium, time period, or culture. That\u2019s the basis for what we do. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe other part about Toledo that is important is the city\u2019s history with industrialized glass. The Studio Glass movement was born in Toledo, literally on the museum\u2019s campus. So the museum has always had a craft component that causes us to think about decorative arts and craft as integral to an overall art historical narrative. We\u2019ve had directors for decades that did not subscribe to the fine art versus craft binary. That has manifested during my tenure of five and a half years in that we\u2019ve acquired 1,300 works of art, 13 of which are digital. So we have this broader collecting ambit that is part of our historical ethos.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo me, it is absolutely essential that we engage with digital art because there is great art being produced, and just because it is a medium that is now being integrated into the canon doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t become canonical. That\u2019s a glib way of saying that we\u2019ve spent the last 10 or 20 years reading about museum exhibitions and scholarly works that rediscover artists. We don\u2019t want to wait 40 years to rediscover these [digital] artists. So digital art absolutely features in the global art history we tell, but also \u201cInfinite Images\u201d demonstrates how this is a 20th- and 21st-century conversation, not just a contemporary conversation.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the same time, digital initiatives are different from digital art. Digital art is part of the canon we\u2019re building. Digital initiatives are the tools that allow us to engage audiences.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you think about Refik Anadol\u2019s Unsupervised, which showed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022, became a major way to engage audiences who might otherwise not have come to the museum. Have you found something similar with \u201cInfinite Images\u201d?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe try to make sure every medium, chronology, and geography is represented over a rolling five-year period. That\u2019s how we make sure that we are fulfilling our obligation to tell a global art history. \u201cInfinite Images\u201d fit within that because it is a contemporary exhibition that showcased digital media in a way our audience is not necessarily seeing. It opened in July, and our attendance was up year-over-year by 77 percent that month. That\u2019s obviously very exciting, but attendance is not the metric of success for us. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhat we actually optimize for is repeat visitors to the collection. With each show, we want to connect people not just with that exhibition but with similar works in the collection. We are planning on reinstalling our whole collection in 2027, and so this provides our audience context for the digital work they will see in that rehang. It\u2019s much less about generating new audiences than it is about contextualizing art history and creating a sense of familiarity and comfort with the works. We hope that when we open our reinstallation these works will be accepted as being within the canon rather than seen as head-scratchers. \u201cInfinite Images\u201d is by no means a prolegomenon for future exhibitions on digital art, but it is a pretty significant survey relative to this country\u2019s standards. It has also connected people who are passionate about digital art in our community.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAn installation view of Quayola, Jardins d\u2019\u00c9t\u00e9, 2017 in \u201cInfinite Images\u201d at the Toledo Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

\n\tWas there a need to generate a lot of new scholarship for the show? Obviously, the Whitney recently did \u201cHarold Cohen: AARON,\u201d but some of the art-historical connections \u201cInfinite Images\u201d is drawing are quite new.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe released an online catalog with three essays. One essay by Julia Kaganskiy, the curator, traces the idea of the show, talking about the development of digital art and some of the antecedents like seriality and conceptual art, as well as artists like Vera Moln\u00e1r.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother essay looks at how institutions deal with digital art, because that is an area of museological practice that is wide open. That essay discusses how museums handle materiality and connects back to Osinachi, the first artist-in-residence at TMA Labs. The reason we worked with Osinachi was because his medium, Microsoft Word, is something everyone uses. You look at something he produced and you think, How the heck did he do that? One of the reasons people know how difficult it is to paint a painting is because they\u2019ve all had to try at some point. But people haven\u2019t been forced to use these digital tools. They haven\u2019t been forced to code. So we wanted to formulate a language: how do you talk about interpretation when you are discussing algorithms? We experimented with a clever footnoting system, where the labels are just 125 words\u2014very accessible\u2014but if you want to go deeper you can.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe also really wanted to make sure we got the display right. We wanted to make sure the works in this exhibition felt the same as works in this space in previous exhibitions felt. I think the team achieved that.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow complex was that undertaking?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe worked with an external designer, in addition to our internal design team. We used a firm called TheGreenEyl [a design studio<\/a> that specializes in digital exhibitions] and came up with two ideas for the show. One would have been very different from a traditional museum display. We ended up with one that was much more traditional, and that was because we felt the semiotics of that display conveyed a sameness that was very important. We didn\u2019t want you to feel like you had walked into NFT.NYC. We wanted it to feel like a museum experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are other parts of the installation that I\u2019m particularly proud of. One is that you can\u2019t see any wires. Two is that not all the work, even if it originates as a digital work, is displayed digitally. Some works are displayed in grids of prints. That created some rhythm to the exhibition where it\u2019s not all screens. There\u2019s contrast between blue light and not blue light. Three is that we invested in the right tech for each individual artwork, which we did in conjunction with the artists. We actually engaged the artist directly and thought about how they wanted their works to be displayed.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAn installation view of works by Tyler Hobbs in \u201cInfinite Images\u201d at the Toledo Museum of Art.<\/p>\n

\n\tWas part of the idea to lean away from the spectacle of the most recent NFT movement and to look soberly at this work and this movement?<\/p>\n

\n\tOver the past few years, the large share of digital art, certainly by market value but also by volume, has been blockchain-based and crypto-denominated. But I hope that if you zoom out and forget the acronyms, you\u2019d see that our engagement with the digital art space has never been about the spectacle but about earnestly trying to understand how digital art is changing the way contemporary artists think about their practice.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exchange cuts both ways. Osinachi, during his residency, created a stained-glass window. Emily Xie, this year\u2019s artist-in-residence, is working with glass too. So it\u2019s not just about onboarding digital art into a museum environment but also about expanding how the digital art ecosystem engages with museums, physical objects, and making.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow do you decide which digital works to collect\u2014and which will stand the test of time\u2014in such a fast-moving field?<\/p>\n

\n\tHumility is important in any field of contemporary art. We do our best, but that doesn\u2019t mean we always get it right. The other caveat is that we make assessments based on quality, not popularity, and the arc of history is long. We want to look back in 50 years and see how we did.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut all that aside, we use the same criteria that we use for Renaissance paintings and everything else: Is it well made? Is it of its time? Does it convey the artist\u2019s intended emotional valence without requiring interpretation? Those are table stakes. And then we also think about how it fits into the whole collection. One thing we are committed to is making sure that people understand that digital art is a global movement. In the US, we can often focus myopically on American artists. [At the museum], we are interested in broadening our understanding of not just digital artists producing digitally native works but also how other artists are exploring the digital.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen we purchased our CryptoPunk, we also purchased a work from Nina Chanel Abney\u2019s SuperPunk series. Another example is that we accepted a gift of an Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB); that was interesting to us because we have a strong and growing collection of numismatics. Bitcoin was the first and most successful blockchain to work as currency, and OMBs are artworks inscribed on individual Bitcoins, like inscriptions on the back of a coin.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is a level of thought and engagement that has to do with intellectual priors, not headlines.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow does TMA Labs fit into this broader digital push?<\/p>\n

\n\tTMA Labs is like an internal consulting operation. It\u2019s less a department on an org chart and more a hub that works across the spokes of the museum. The most visible way it has helped us is in thinking through how we engage with digital art. When we purchased Abyssinian Queen, an NFT created by the artist Yatreda, we had to figure out how to set up our crypto wallet and handle the conversion, and so on. TMA Labs assisted that work. And then you have to think about how you care for that work\u2014or, when we first started accepting gifts, we had to do research to land on the Giving Block as the platform for accepting crypto gifts\u2014all of that was taken on by TMA Labs.<\/p>\n

\n\tThey have also been involved in projects outside of Web3. They are helping us to think through the right use cases for AI within our workflows that are ethical, energy-efficient, and sustainable. If we decide to use an LLM [like ChatGPT], we want to make sure that it is aligned with our values.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe biggest project right now is the reinstallation of the collection in 2027. The precipitating factor for that is that our heating and cooling system is at the end of its life\u2014not glamorous, but vitally important. It\u2019s a big and expensive project that is not that exciting to donors. But donors are excited about a conceptual and intellectual reboot. It made sense to conjoin those projects and to bring everything down to the studs.<\/p>\n

\n\tMy predecessors were incredibly forward-thinking in how they overbuilt the museum so that it could continue to grow over the last 84 years without building another building. I\u2019ve been thinking about what is the equivalent thing I can do to set us up for the next 40 or 50 years. The answer is power and data. So we are bringing computing power onsite, and then the question is how do you cool that? What ductwork are you using? Now is the time to do this. Every museum that has a major capital project upcoming should be thinking about this. TMA Labs is working with our IT department, with facilities, and with our curatorial team to make sure we have the hardwired power, data capacity, and Wi-Fi so we can build these digital experiences.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAn installation view of work by the Toledo Museum of Art\u2019s current digital artists in residence.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNoah Ackerman<\/p>\n

\n\tAs you\u2019re looking at the museum right now, what do you envision all that data processing, servers, and so on powering?<\/p>\n

\n\tI believe the future is going to be even more personalized than it is today, and the expectations for personalized experiences will increase. A lot of the interpretive technology at museums right now is place-based. You stand in front of an artwork and you are delivered the interpretation there. That can be great, but it can be distracting. But imagine you are standing in front of Monet\u2019s Water Lilies and your phone buzzes: \u201cDo you want to hear more?\u201d You can say no and just look\u2014or you can dive deeper later, maybe even when you\u2019re at home. Maybe you get pushed a notification when you are on the couch or at a caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you think about other areas, like shopping, everyone likes being served things that they might like based on their shopping histories. Places remember your itineraries. More and more people will expect personalization like that when they engage with museums in the future. Part of our education mission is facilitating discovery. That\u2019s going to be an important part of what we need to construct in our digital experiences.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn a technical level, that means building technological infrastructure that has hyper-specific location awareness for those people who are willing to share that information. Ideally, we would know how long you spend in front of a painting or be able to recommend similar works in our collection for you to look at. Maybe the curator of an exhibition is going to give a talk, and we send out invites only to those 50 people who spent a certain amount of time at a show. We can say, \u201cWe realize you really like this\u2014do you want to join a special experience?\u201d We\u2019re not selling widgets; we\u2019re providing information and education, so we want to facilitate that.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt seems like you are trying to build a feedback loop for people to want to come back.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe want to be able to collect decision-grade data that facilitates repeat visitation. There\u2019s nothing nefarious about that. It\u2019s opt-in, and we\u2019re very transparent about that. But we want to help people learn more about our collection and to engage deeply and create a sense of community, which is a gap in how museums operate, I think.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe want to bring people together in person. In Toledo, another added benefit is that one-third of our visitors are Republicans, a third Democrats, and a third independents. In an increasingly polarized world, the museum is one of the few places where people come together around shared passions, not disagreements. That\u2019s important.<\/p>\n

\n\tA lot of the topics that TMA Labs deals with\u2014AI, blockchain, or otherwise\u2014can be points of friction. How have you worked to resolve those points of tension?<\/p>\n

\n\tI wouldn\u2019t say that there have been points of friction, but certainly there have been a few things that we had to address internally very transparently. Certainly AI is viewed as posing an existential threat. Engaging with AI can worry people. But I\u2019ve been very clear with the staff\u2014I email them every week\u2014that AI is a tool. If you look at \u201cInfinite Images,\u201d it demonstrates how AI can be used. It\u2019s often called by developers \u201chuman in the loop\u201d\u2014it\u2019s not replacing anyone, it\u2019s giving us more scale. It is a technology that, with rigorous research and picking the right tool, can expand the amount of work we can do and can help us better support our mission. But we only use tools that align with our values and support our mission, full stop.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other issue that comes up often is energy usage. This is a place where you have to look at long-term trends and be thoughtful about the research you put in. TMA Labs\u2014specifically one of our fellows\u2014has been researching relative energy usage and water usage for various tools. It gets complicated because you have to look at the supply chain of the energy. Natural gas versus geothermal power\u2014they are very different. It\u2019s a complicated calculus. We\u2019re making good-faith efforts to understand that before we roll out a more formal approach internally.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd the team knows we are doing that work. We are engaged with a sustainability consultant across the reinstallation, but also on these dimensions as well. On the NFT side of things, Ethereum, since the Merge [in 2022], has decreased its energy consumption by 99 percent just by moving from proof of work to proof of stake. So there\u2019s nuance to all these things, and we are cognizant of what people are concerned about. We\u2019re not perfect. We make mistakes along the way, but we\u2019re trying to be cognizant of the impacts. At the same time, I have yet to meet someone who really believes that there will be less digital or AI in the world 10 years from now than there is today. It\u2019s not a question of if, but when.<\/p>\n

\n\tDoes Toledo\u2019s smaller scale, compared to, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, make experimentation easier?<\/p>\n

\n\tAbsolutely. We have a scale that allows us to do things that matter internationally while also allowing us to be more nimble. We\u2019re one-twentieth the size of the Met and one-tenth the size of MoMA. That means I can walk across the building to collaborate with the person I need.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s also less expensive to operate here. We make every effort to be super competitive in compensation, benefits, etc., at a national scale. But also our energy bill is much less. Our resources stretch further. Donors see that there\u2019s bang for their buck in investing in Toledo. A smaller investment can push the museum further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the five or so years since taking the reins as director and CEO of the Toledo Museum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60,38389],"class_list":["post-79225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-toledo-museum-of-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}