The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) has launched the initiative Africa Art Library to donate books to libraries on the continent. The museum donated around 100 books to the Koyo Kouoh Library at the Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art in Kigali, Rwanda, earlier this year and a second set is headed to the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana, this month.
The subjects of the books cover Africa and African diasporic art as well as art history, criticism, museum education and other relevant topics, and have been selected by the receiving libraries from the TMA’s library inventory.
The idea grew out of conversations over the past four years among leaders of the TMA and African art residency spaces, foundations and cultural institutions, during which books for their libraries were among the top requests.
During the process of the museum’s current reinstallation—the first in 40 years—the team realised that “like so many Western institutions, [the TMA] did not have adequate representation of the breadth and depth of artistic traditions on the African continent, including and especially Modern and contemporary art histories”, Adam M. Levine, the museum’s president, director and chief executive officer, tells The Art Newspaper.
The TMA team travelled to African countries and bought artworks for its collection by the likes of Jimoh Akolo, the late Nigerian artist renowned for his contributions to modern Nigerian art. He was also a member of the Zaria Art Society, a group of local artists known for their rejection of Western art-focused curricula by their mainly British lecturers, who chose to embrace indigenous Nigerian art in the late 1950s to early 1960s.
“Our objective was not just to go to these places to try and find artworks but to figure out how we could partner and support these ecosystems without being extractive. Without perpetuating sort of colonialist or imperialist logic,” Levine adds.
Prior relationships and engagements with people on the ground helped select the receiving partners for the pilot Africa Art Library initiative, supported by the Accra- and London-based Gallery 1957 and its founder, Marwan Zakhem.
Alexandra Nickolaou, a fellow in African and African Diasporic Art at the TMA, is leading on the Africa Art Library project and views it as a long-term initiative. She hopes to bring other museum libraries across the US on board as partners and aims to expand and add more recipients in other African countries.
“I think [the initiative] is a really fantastic way to think about partnerships with the continent [...] making sure that these partnerships are not just strengthening repatriation efforts but also creating good lasting partnerships outside of that in other ways that have to do with art education and not just art itself,” says Nickolaou.
Over the past year, the TMA has also partnered with Nigeria’s Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art for cultural exchanges that boost museum expertise and access, and with the Ethiopian Heritage Authority to return objects to Ethiopia. The TMA is set to reopen its galleries in autumn 2027.
