In the five or so years since taking the reins as director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art, Adam Levine has helped the Ohio institution become a case study in how to adapt to the digital age.
In addition to growing the museum’s 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 “Infinite Images,” an exhibition tracing the long history of computer and digital art, on view through November.
At just 38 years old, Levine is one of the youngest museum directors in the US—a 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 now led by Ian Charles Stewart, a cofounder of Wired magazine; the opening of “Infinite Images”; and how he is preparing the museum for a future in which personalization is as expected in museums as it is in online shopping.
The interview below has been edited for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: You’ve said museums shouldn’t just pivot online but rethink what they’re for. How has that process unfolded in Toledo, especially with the launch of TMA Labs and “Infinite Images”?
Adam Levine: The Toledo Museum of Art was founded in 1901 and has long focused on acquiring superlative artworks—artworks of singular aesthetic merit, not encyclopedism. We seek to have individual objects that are exquisite regardless of medium, time period, or culture. That’s the basis for what we do.
The other part about Toledo that is important is the city’s history with industrialized glass. The Studio Glass movement was born in Toledo, literally on the museum’s 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’ve 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’ve 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.
To 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’t mean it won’t become canonical. That’s a glib way of saying that we’ve spent the last 10 or 20 years reading about museum exhibitions and scholarly works that rediscover artists. We don’t want to wait 40 years to rediscover these [digital] artists. So digital art absolutely features in the global art history we tell, but also “Infinite Images” demonstrates how this is a 20th- and 21st-century conversation, not just a contemporary conversation.
At the same time, digital initiatives are different from digital art. Digital art is part of the canon we’re building. Digital initiatives are the tools that allow us to engage audiences.
If you think about Refik Anadol’s 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 “Infinite Images”?
We try to make sure every medium, chronology, and geography is represented over a rolling five-year period. That’s how we make sure that we are fulfilling our obligation to tell a global art history. “Infinite Images” 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’s obviously very exciting, but attendance is not the metric of success for us.
What 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’s 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. “Infinite Images” is by no means a prolegomenon for future exhibitions on digital art, but it is a pretty significant survey relative to this country’s standards. It has also connected people who are passionate about digital art in our community.
Was there a need to generate a lot of new scholarship for the show? Obviously, the Whitney recently did “Harold Cohen: AARON,” but some of the art-historical connections “Infinite Images” is drawing are quite new.
We 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 Molnár.
Another 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’ve all had to try at some point. But people haven’t been forced to use these digital tools. They haven’t 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—very accessible—but if you want to go deeper you can.
We 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.
How complex was that undertaking?
We worked with an external designer, in addition to our internal design team. We used a firm called TheGreenEyl [a design studio 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’t want you to feel like you had walked into NFT.NYC. We wanted it to feel like a museum experience.
There are other parts of the installation that I’m particularly proud of. One is that you can’t 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’s not all screens. There’s 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.
Was 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?
Over 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’d 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.
The exchange cuts both ways. Osinachi, during his residency, created a stained-glass window. Emily Xie, this year’s artist-in-residence, is working with glass too. So it’s 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.
How do you decide which digital works to collect—and which will stand the test of time—in such a fast-moving field?
Humility is important in any field of contemporary art. We do our best, but that doesn’t 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.
But 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’s 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.
When we purchased our CryptoPunk, we also purchased a work from Nina Chanel Abney’s 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.
There is a level of thought and engagement that has to do with intellectual priors, not headlines.
How does TMA Labs fit into this broader digital push?
TMA Labs is like an internal consulting operation. It’s 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—or, when we first started accepting gifts, we had to do research to land on the Giving Block as the platform for accepting crypto gifts—all of that was taken on by TMA Labs.
They 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.
The 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—not glamorous, but vitally important. It’s 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.
My 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’ve 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.
Noah Ackerman
As you’re looking at the museum right now, what do you envision all that data processing, servers, and so on powering?
I 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’s Water Lilies and your phone buzzes: “Do you want to hear more?” You can say no and just look—or you can dive deeper later, maybe even when you’re at home. Maybe you get pushed a notification when you are on the couch or at a café.
If 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’s going to be an important part of what we need to construct in our digital experiences.
On 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, “We realize you really like this—do you want to join a special experience?” We’re not selling widgets; we’re providing information and education, so we want to facilitate that.
It seems like you are trying to build a feedback loop for people to want to come back.
We want to be able to collect decision-grade data that facilitates repeat visitation. There’s nothing nefarious about that. It’s opt-in, and we’re 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.
We 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’s important.
A lot of the topics that TMA Labs deals with—AI, blockchain, or otherwise—can be points of friction. How have you worked to resolve those points of tension?
I wouldn’t 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’ve been very clear with the staff—I email them every week—that AI is a tool. If you look at “Infinite Images,” it demonstrates how AI can be used. It’s often called by developers “human in the loop”—it’s not replacing anyone, it’s giving us more skin. 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.
The 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—specifically one of our fellows—has 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—they are very different. It’s a complicated calculus. We’re making good-faith efforts to understand that before we roll out a more formal approach internally.
And 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’s nuance to all these things, and we are cognizant of what people are concerned about. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes along the way, but we’re 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’s not a question of if, but when.
Does Toledo’s smaller scale, compared to, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, make experimentation easier?
Absolutely. We have a scale that allows us to do things that matter internationally while also allowing us to be more nimble. We’re 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.
It’s 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’s bang for their buck in investing in Toledo. A smaller investment can push the museum further.
