Toledo Museum of Art

Edward Drummond Libbey moved his glass company to Toledo in the late 1800s, drawn by the region's natural gas and sand, and his firm and its offshoots turned the city into a center of the American glass industry, earning Toledo the nickname the Glass City. Libbey and his wife Florence were deeply committed to their adopted city, and they founded the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901.

Libbey believed art should belong to everyone, not just the wealthy, and he built the museum on the principle of open access to all. He and Florence gave generously of their fortune and their own art collection, and the elegant Greek Revival museum building rose in the early 1900s. Their vision of a great art museum freely open to a working city remains the museum's guiding spirit today.

The museum's collection is remarkable for a city of Toledo's size, spanning thousands of years and many cultures. Galleries move from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art through medieval and Renaissance works to European masters, and on into American painting and modern and contemporary art, with strong holdings of decorative arts and sculpture along the way.

Woven through it all, unsurprisingly, is glass, one of the museum's signature strengths. The collection traces the art of glass from the ancient world to the present, a fitting focus for the Glass City and a thread that ties the museum's holdings to the industry that built its home town.

Across the street from the main building stands the museum's most celebrated modern structure, the Glass Pavilion, opened in the 2000s and designed by the Japanese architecture firm SANAA. Its walls are made almost entirely of large curving panels of glass, so the building itself becomes a demonstration of the material it was built to celebrate, glowing and transparent, blurring the line between inside and out.

Inside, the pavilion houses the glass collection and working glassmaking studios where visitors can watch artists gather and blow molten glass in live demonstrations. Standing in a building of glass, watching glass being made, in the city that calls itself the Glass City, is one of the most memorable experiences a Midwest museum offers.

The main museum is a dignified Greek Revival temple of art, its galleries arranged around a central Peristyle, a columned concert hall that hosts music and events in a setting of classical grandeur. The building sits in Toledo's Old West End, a neighborhood known for one of the largest collections of grand Victorian homes in the country.

The setting gives a visit a sense of place, an art temple set among stately old houses in a city shaped by industry and craft. Together the Greek Revival main building and the glowing modern Glass Pavilion across the street tell the story of a city and a museum that have honored both tradition and invention.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.