Struggling Leonardo museum calls off auction
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An auction listing for The Leonardo museum's biplane. Image via bid.palletauctions.com
After an auction listing for several of The Leonardo's exhibits generated confusion about the science and art museum's future, the auction house confirmed the sale is off.
Why it matters: The sale was scheduled, postponed and canceled amid repairs and financial woes that led the museum to close indefinitely in June.
Driving the news: The auction — which included items ranging from a C-131 airplane from the 1950s to a skeleton in a lab coat — was scheduled to begin Thursday, according to a listing by Salt Lake's Erkelens & Olson Auction and Appraisal Co.
The intrigue: When asked about the sale, Leonardo board member Lisa Davis told Axios on Tuesday, "No items from The Leonardo are currently available via auction. If that changes, we will be sure to post a notification on our website."
What they said: "It's not on for [Thursday]. I don't know if we'll be doing it," auction house employee Dave Olson told Axios Wednesday afternoon. "... There's apparently some miscommunication. We're ready to go, but Leonardo was not quite ready to go, so they asked us to put a put a pause on it."
Context: The auction was mentioned in a Sept. 9 Facebook post by Erkelens & Olsen.
- "The Leonardo auction is LIVE and we have a comically high amount of side bets of what this stuff will go for," the post stated.
- Multiple items appear to have received bids on the auction site while it was live.
What's inside: Items from the museum's flight exhibit, including flight simulators, a MiG-15 aircraft and a biplane, were listed next to microscopes, office supplies and furniture, as well as:
- a metal grid of Salt Lake City's streets
- a bipedal robot
- a "Jacob's ladder" electric spark display
- Condor harnesses
- two busts of Leonardo da Vinci
- a model living room at the time of the 1968 lunar landing
Catch up quick: The Leonardo closed unexpectedly in June amid debts and neglected repairs to the building, which Salt Lake City owns.
- At the time, city officials said they were working with the museum to address "maintenance needs that have not been resolved by the tenant as part of the lease agreement" and bring it into ADA compliance.
The latest: City officials "were not made aware of the auction prior to its launch," Andrew Wittenberg, a spokesperson for the mayor's office, told Axios on Tuesday.
- The city has not taken action to evict the museum since it shut its doors in June.
The big picture: The museum, which opened in 2011, has struggled financially for years.
- In 2019, Mayor Jackie Biskupski's office served the museum a default notice of over $600,000 in unpaid bills and neglected building maintenance.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the auction has been canceled; Erkelens & Olson Auction and Appraisal Company contacted Axios after publication to confirm the sale was off.