Visitors can expect the institution to continue diversifying its art collection and staff, to see more school children in the galleries, to see more exhibitions with immersive digital displays, and to see guards in new, more casual uniforms.
Flowering trees add color to Wade Lagoon, presided over by the Cleveland Museum of Art, which opened in 1916.CLEVELAND, Ohio — Visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art can expect the once conservative institution to continue diversifying its art collection and staff, to see more school children in the galleries, to see more exhibitions with immersive digital displays, and to see guards in new, more casual uniforms.
The emphasis on broadening and diversifying the collection is a key part of the new strategic plan, which the museum will unveil this week. During the first six or seven decades after it opened in 1916, the museum focused primarily on collecting European Old Master paintings and medieval art, and art from Asia.
“That’s the spirit of the whole plan,’’ Griswold said. “Our guards are not policing the museum. They’re here of course to protect the art and our visitors, but they’re here to facilitate.” Griswold said the museum isn’t fixated on the earlier goal, announced in 2017, of bringing its endowment to $1.25 billion by 2027. Instead, he said, the museum wants to make sure that its endowment, which peaked at $1 billion before the recent stock market downturn, performs better than benchmarks including standard stock indexes. The endowment, now worth $875 million, still makes the museum one of the wealthiest institutions of its kind in the U.S.
Griswold, who turns 62 today, Monday, September 19, and who has led the museum since 2014, has two years left to go on his 10-year contract. He led the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York before becoming the Cleveland museum’s ninth director. “I’m really committed to this place,’’ Griswold said. “That doesn’t mean that I will necessarily stay on into my dotage. I think leadership change is really good for institutions like this. But I also recognize that it was particularly important here for someone to stay for a while.
- Completing the Community Arts Center in the Pivot Center off West 25th Street in Tremont, near the Clark-Fulton neighborhood. A photo montage approximates what visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art's "Revealing Krishna" exhibit will see when they don Hololens 2 headsets to visit a digital reconstruction of a cave in Cambodia that once housed the museum's big Krishna statue.“We know there is a public appetite for immersive experiences,’’ Griswold said.