TOLEDO, OH.- The Toledo Museum of Art announces the acquisition of over 200 works of art through purchase and gift in 2025. Spanning millennia and reaching across the globe, these acquisitions enhance the Museum’s renowned holdings in key regions and time periods ahead of the complete reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection, which will be completed in 2027 and organized chronologically to foster a truly global and inclusive art history.
From 13th-century icon paintings made during the Crusades and Korean ceramics from the 17th-century Joseon period to Black modernists of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary Indigenous artists, the broad scope of this year’s acquisitions reflects the museum’s ambitious collecting strategy of telling a global art history through objects of superlative aesthetic merit.
Highlight Acquisitions include:
• Produced in the Crusader Kingdom (modern day Acre, Israel) in the 1260s by an artist from western Europe, the Crusader Icon belongs to a small group of icons, most of which were preserved in the Monastery of St Catherine’s in Sinai. Representing a moment of artistic conversation between western and Byzantine Christian painting, this exceptionally rare panel depicts two of the Five Martyrs of Sebaste, who were murdered under Emperor Diocletian, and was made in the Holy Land near the end of the European Crusades.
• Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully is best known for her “personality prints”—134 triptychs, each representing the personality of an individual or character of an idea. While some reflect the culture of her Dakota community and other Indigenous nations, or scenes she observed while living in New York City, others feature Euro-American celebrities from popular culture, politics, and religion. The latter is exemplified by Dr. Carl Seashore (ca. 1920-40s), comprised of geometric patterning, vibrant colors, and abstracted references.
• Martin Puryear’s Bound Cone (1973) exemplifies his commitment to traditional building methods and dedication to craftsmanship in the creation of his minimalist wood sculptures. Primarily comprised of wood, but also utilizing an array of other materials, including wire mesh, tar, stone, stainless steel, and bronze, Puryear’s work is characterized by the artist’s reliance on his own hand to create and by his insistence on mastering his materials, often through preparatory drawings and maquettes. This oak and rope sculpture stands life-sized at six feet and is comprised of two symmetrical halves of wood that, when placed together, form a cone shape, which is wrapped with a long rope.
• Amoako Boafo’s large-scale painting, White Picnic Blanket (2021), is a provocative commentary on the disposition of the Black female body in the popular imagination. Drawing on his experiences in Austria, Vienna, where people of African descent are commonly marginalized and reduced to laborers, Boafo depicts the Black female figure in an alternative moment of rest and reprieve. Boafo’s provocative treatment of Black skin and intentional depiction of Black sitters in various states of leisure instead of labor challenges dominant narratives and highlights alternative realities encompassing the African experience.
• Created by forming two hemispherical bowls on a wheel and joining them together before being fired with a white-tinged translucent glaze, the Moon Jar serves as a rare example of 17th-century Joseon porcelain. As utilitarian objects—referred to as daeho (literally “big jar”)—moon jars have become a national icon in Korea, coveted for their exquisite asymmetry and subtlety. This work features an iron underglaze drawing of two orchid blooms: a cherished symbol in literati lore of a scholar’s purity of heart, loyalty, and integrity.
• In his “Ecriture” series, of which Ecriture 16-76 (1976) is a part, artist Park Seo-Bo pushed beyond the aesthetic binary that had become entrenched in Korea between abstraction and figuration. Raising the question of what separates painting from drawing, this work shows Park pushing a pencil doggedly through layers of oil paint, as if he were trying to confirm the concreteness of his materials. The scratching and digging into paint that results collapses the surface’s presumed function as a boundary separating the world of the work and that of the viewer.
• Hale Woodruff’sThe Underground Railroad (1942) was commissioned as part of a series of six large-scale murals for the library at Talladega College, Alabama’s first private Historically Black College. Having recently returned from Mexico, where he worked alongside Diego Rivera, Woodruff created these murals to honor the founders of the college and all the individuals and abolitionist organizations responsible for its creation. Woodruff’s mural has particularly resonance for Toledo, a city that served as the final stop on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people escaping to freedom in Canada via the Great Lakes.
• Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan was a painter, poet, essayist and philosopher, who is now celebrated as one of the most prolific Arab American writers and artists of the last century. Having created almost 100 paintings exploring color, light, texture, and nature, Torch (1959) represents one of her earliest works and exemplifies a stylistic approach that she would return to over the course of her career.
• Cup of Joy is an exceptional Kiddush cup—an object used to sanctify the Sabbath and Jewish holidays—that is made of silver but features a rare early pairing of Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions alongside Jewish iconography. Together, these represent the richly intertwined histories of Islamic artistry and Jewish tradition. Almost certainly the product of a workshop in the region of Khorasan in the late 11th century, the cup bears distinctive designs and inscriptions particular to Central Asian silversmithing of the time.
These acquisitions directly support TMA's first comprehensive reinstallation of its permanent collection in more than 40 years. "These additions represent more than an expansion of our collection—they are the essential building blocks of the narrative we will present in 2027," said Adam M. Levine, TMA’s Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey Director, President, and CEO. "Each work has been strategically selected to fill critical gaps and strengthen areas where we can now tell richer stories about the history of global connectedness."
Upon completion in 2027, visitors will experience art history as a continuous journey, with galleries flowing chronologically through time periods and artistic traditions. This new presentation will span 6,000 years of human creativity across 125,000 square feet of galleries, revealing the interconnectedness of cultures and artistic traditions throughout history. The reinstallation also includes upgraded lighting, climate control, accessibility features, and a new temporary exhibition space, while preserving beloved architectural elements like The Cloister.
