The Toledo Museum of Art has begun sending books to libraries in Africa under a new programme designed to support art education on the continent without repeating older, extractive patterns of collecting. The initiative, called Africa Art Library, has already delivered about 100 volumes to the Koyo Kouoh Library at the Gihanga Institute of Contemporary Art in Kigali, Rwanda, earlier this year. A second consignment is on its way to the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana, this month.

Crucially, the receiving libraries choose the titles themselves from the museum's own library stock. The subjects span African and African diasporic art alongside art history, criticism and museum education. The idea grew from four years of conversations between Toledo's leadership and African residency spaces, foundations and cultural organisations, in which library books repeatedly emerged as a top request.

The project is tied to a broader self-examination at the museum, which is midway through its first full reinstallation in four decades. Director Adam Levine told the newspaper that the process exposed how thinly the breadth of African artistic traditions, particularly modern and contemporary histories, had been represented. Recent trips to buy work by artists such as the late Nigerian modernist Jimoh Akolo, a member of the Zaria Art Society, prompted the museum to ask how it could support local ecosystems rather than simply extracting from them.

The pilot is supported by the Accra- and London-based Gallery 1957 and its founder Marwan Zakhem, and is led at Toledo by fellow Alexandra Nickolaou. She hopes other American museum libraries will join and that more countries will be added. The museum has also recently partnered with Nigeria's Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art and returned objects to Ethiopia, and its galleries are due to reopen in autumn 2027.