1,300 Toledoans Ask Ohio to Enforce Libbey’s Will as Museum Art Sits in Storage
TOLEDO — Artists of Toledo has asked the Ohio attorney general’s office to review whether the Toledo Museum of Art is honoring the will of its founder, Edward Drummond Libbey, while much of its collection sits in storage during a major rebuild. The group sent a 23-page request for review backed by a petition, “Enforce Libbey’s Will and Protect Toledo’s Art,” counting 1,309 signatures, The Lake Erie Inquiry reported Friday.
The request asks the state to review donor intent, administration of the charitable trust, governance, and public access to collection works, according to the report. The museum’s main galleries will remain closed until fall 2027 during the rebuild.
Libbey, the glassmaker whose fortune built the museum, left it an endowment. Artists of Toledo says he also required that art bought with it be kept and shown in Toledo.
The group’s case centers on a 2006 museum press kit that pictured 12 well-known glass pieces. Eleven of them now read “Not on View” in the museum’s own catalog, and nine have no stated location, confirmed loan, or return date. Their exhibition histories end years ago, the report said.
The catalog records do not tell the full story. Two of the 11 pieces listed as “Not on View” — a Louis Comfort Tiffany vase and the Libbey punch-bowl set — appear, with their accession numbers, among the highlighted works in TMA Forever, the museum’s show of collection favorites, which runs to Jan. 3. The twelfth piece, the Gazelle Bowl, reads On View in Glass Pavilion Gallery 3.
The museum says displaced art was stored or lent, and that loans will return when the building reopens. It forecasts about 2,300 objects on display after reopening, compared with 1,200 before. Those figures cover the museum as a whole, not the nine pieces at issue.
The petition is one side of a dispute, and a contradiction in the museum’s catalog is not proof of wrongdoing. The request asks the attorney general’s office to examine the questions it raises; the museum’s public pages and records do not state where the nine pieces are now or when they will return. The rebuilt galleries are designed to reopen old doorways, show the history of glass, and add a quiet room for visitors.
Toledo Museum of Art exterior, via Wikimedia Commons.
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