Everyone might have a different opinion about art, but it also says much about the cultures that produce and embrace it.

Expect that perspective and more Thursday, when Johnnetta Betsch Cole delivers a free 6 p.m. talk at the Peristyle at the Toledo Museum of Art.

As director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, Cole will discuss African art and its burgeoning acceptance, especially in the last four years.

However, that’s not the only reason she’s coming, said Brian Kennedy, director of Toledo’s museum.

“She’s [president of the] Association of Art Museum Directors — that’s a very distinguished role,” said Kennedy, who has come to know  Cole through AAMD, of which he is treasurer.

He acknowledged that her monumental achievements — she served as president of the nation’s only two historically black women’s colleges, Bennett in Greensboro, N.C., and Spelman in Atlanta — and her sphere of influence that includes her roles as a civil rights activist, anthropologist, and educator, are astonishing.

Additionally, she was the first woman elected to the board of Coca-Cola, the first African-American to become chairman of United Way, and just this year, she received the BET Honors Education Award for her work on diversity and inclusion.

Kennedy pointed out that the museum’s 20/20 strategic plan of inclusion fits hand-in-glove with a guest such as Johnnetta Cole.

“In order to energize our conversation we invited her to address these points,” he said. “She’s had a lot of experience with this over the years.”

That skill includes her leading one of the Smithsonian’s 19 museums for the last six years, when she came out of retirement. “I’m so glad I did,” she said of making the move.

Cole attended Fisk University in Nashville when she was 15 years old. She then transferred to Ohio’s Oberlin College, from which she obtained a bachelor of anthropology. She was president of Spelman for 10 years from 1987, and at Bennett for five years, beginning in 2002.

“It was certainly an extraordinary privilege to serve as the president of the only two historically black colleges for women in the United States,” she said. “On both of those campuses, I would say my fondest memories are of young women discovering, owning, and exercising their empowerment, so much so that we would often say at both of those colleges, that when we did our work well, these young women really came to believe that they could fly.”

Refusing to take sole credit for changes and improvements at the National Museum of African Art, Cole said she is “comfortable saying how we have done that at our museum.”

“Our curators present remarkable exhibitions that tell stories. That’s what exhibitions really do. By presenting visual culture they tell stories about life, dreams, challenges among African people,” she said. “But we also have educators like every other museum of any size. We have an education department where colleagues use the presence of this art in exhibition in various educational programs, many of which are for young children, some of which are scholarly programs.

“I like to capture what our mission is, by saying we want to encourage and inspire conversations about the diverse and dynamic visual arts of Africa as a reflection of life on that continent, and indeed, how people of that continent interact with the rest of the world,” she said.

The focus of her recent trip to Nigeria was to send an exhibition of the photographs of Chief Solomon Osaige Alonge of Nigeria to a museum in Benin, Nigeria.

“This will be the first time in the history of our museum, which is 51 years old, and the first time in the history of the Smithsonian, that we will have sent as a gift an exhibition to an African country,” she said.

Cole had this to say about her museum’s “Connecting the Gems of the Indian Ocean: From Oman to East Africa,” project:

“That is a wonderful example of helping our visitors to rethink how they think about Africa,” she said. “Here’s a project that centers on the long-standing relationship between Oman on the Arabian peninsula and Swahili speaking peoples of the East Coast of Africa. In other words, it is an exhibition that teaches and inspires our audiences around long-standing ties that go back to trade, unfortunately to enslavement, and definitively to cultural exchange.

“We now have an exhibition — a virtual exhibition — on Oman and East Africa. So by going on the web, one can see how music, visual arts, food, dance, and even language — today, right now — in both Oman and East Africa reflect this long-standing relationship between the peoples.”

Cole notes that African art has now assumed such a large presence on the world stage that it cannot be ignored.

“Part of why African art has gained a greater presence in the world of art could be because the entire continent of Africa is receiving greater attention. For example, the fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa,” she said. “When we look at what contemporary African art sells for, the prices have soared. That is also the case in the international art market; that is also the case with traditional African art … of museum quality.”

This attention, of course, has not always been. For decades, Cole said, African art did not receive its proper place in art history books, in museum exhibitions, or in galleries, and that “stereotypes dominated our views about Africa.”

“When African art was mentioned, too often it was only mentioned as inspiring Pablo Picasso and impressionist artists,” she lamented during a recent telephone interview with The Blade. “For years and years, probably the most well-known image in my country could well have been Tarzan, and so art museums, ours included, have the responsibility to help people rethink how they think about Africa.”

During Cole’s lecture on Thursday she will discuss “best practices that can help museums move toward far greater diversity and a far more inclusive culture.”

“That means that boards must be more diverse, staff need to be more diverse, we need greater diversity in our exhibitions, in our educational programs, and yes, and in the visitors who come to our museums.

“In short, we live in a nation of diverse peoples and cultures. The world is full of different peoples and cultures, and our museums need to reflect those realities,” she said.

Contact Rose Russell at rrussell@theblade.com or 419-724-6178.

First Published October 4, 2015, 4:00 a.m.