The last time I visited the Dayton Art Institute was an unpleasant experience. I grew up in Dayton and was intimate with its collection. I was disappointed upon discovering that the collection had been rearranged to reflect woke bromides. At bottom, woke means aligning with NGO-supported and government-mandated policies. In other words, it’s where the money is. Many people believe it’s the virtue signalling perk that attracts people to wokeism, but really, it’s the money. The virtue-signalling perk is the cherry on top.
My recent visit brought more bad news, but there is also good news, so let’s start with the latter. The thing most people know about Dayton is that it is the home of the Wright brothers. Dayton was the central hub of early aeronautical research, testing, and manufacturing. Dayton had money, and the Institute’s beautiful Italian Renaissance-inspired building reflects this. Dayton still has museum-donating funds, as evidenced by recent updates.
They added new galleries to house Contemporary exhibitions and updated the lobby and museum store.
The permanent collection is once again organized by era and region, rather than by grievance.
Don’t get too excited about the Contemporary showcase, though. For Progressives, the past is a bad place only visited for ideological purposes. The amphorous “Contemporary times” begin roughly around the birth of mass media — the 1950s. If you’ve seen one “contemporary” exhibition, you’ve seen them all. I’m not exaggerating. The only differences between 2025 and 1985 are that the curators are hugely credentialed and the exhibitors are exclusively women, minorities, and other grievance groups.
In other bad news, the Institute’s website is still abysmal. If anything, it crashes more often than it did several years ago when I last visited. It still has works that are not cataloged in the online reference. Worst of all is the shockingly amateurish quality of the artwork reproductions. Take a look at some of these out-of-focus and clumsy examples.
The Institute might be better off if it invested its budget in professional photographers rather than in the army of greeters and staff milling about the foyer during our visit.
