Medici Museum Plans Grand Opening

HOWLAND TOWNSHIP, Ohio – The Medici Museum of Modern Art will celebrate its grand opening today at noon with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The museum, at 9350 E. Market St., opened in 2020, amid the pandemic. It currently is showing a high-profile exhibition of 65 Norman Rockwell paintings that were done for the Boy Scouts of America.

Also on display are works by other illustrators and painters that were part of the Boy Scouts collection, which is on loan to the Medici. The artists and illustrators include Walt Disney, Carl Clemens Mortiz Rungius, Howard Chandler Christy and Joseph Christian Leyendecker.

Admission to the museum is free.

The Boy Scouts declared bankruptcy early this year, the result of thousands of sexual abuse claims.

The paintings in the BSA’s $100 million art collection will be sold as soon as a judge can organize it, Ned Gold, chairman of the collection for the museum, told the Business Journal in March.

The paintings by the late Rockwell were created between 1920 and 1970 and were commissioned by the BSA for use in its publications.

Owned by Foundation Medici and opened in 2019, the museum was formerly the Butler Institute of American Art Trumbull Branch but severed that relationship over several issues, including a disagreement over whether to obtain and display the BSA collection.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.