Cleveland Museum of Art’s new strategic plan envisions a more diverse, welcoming, audience-centered institution

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.

Those are among the highlights of a new strategic plan aimed at making Ohio’s biggest and wealthiest art museum more approachable, more audience-centered, and more representative of global cultures and overlooked areas of art history while maintaining high standards of scholarly and artistic quality.

William Griswold, the museum’s director and president since 2014, said in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, that the new plan, “corresponds to a change in our field, which is I think becoming less top-down, less inside out, less about museums telling audiences: ‘This is what we think is good for you.’ "

The new plan builds on the earlier strategic plan, released in 2017, and the museum’s first plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion, completed in 2018. The museum says the diversity plan was the first of its kind for a large American art museum.

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.

Along the way, it added strengths in ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, pre-Columbian art, American art through the middle 20th century, and early modern European art.

Now, as it heads deeper into its second century, the museum plans to add to the hundreds of works of art by women and artists of color that it has recently acquired.

Diversifying art

It’s also broadening its reach for the first time to new areas of art history including Judaica, and art from colonial Latin America, plus contemporary art by Indigenous artists in the U.S. and by artists from Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the globe. Digital art will also be part of the mix.

At the same time, the museum will expand school visits, train all front-line staff to make visitors feel more welcome, and create new, more casual uniforms for staff, including security guards.

“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.”

Entitled, “For the Benefit of All the People,’’ the new strategic plan doubles down on the museum’s vision of itself as a visitor-centered institution. It also echoes a landmark phrase in the 1892 deed for the museum’s land written by industrialist and donor Jeptha H. Wade II.

The new plan refines the goals the museum aims to reach by 2027 for finances, attendance, the visitor experience, the use of digital technology in special exhibitions, and a near-term vision for the museum’s building following a $320 million expansion and renovation completed in 2013.

Benchmarks include reaching physical attendance of 1 million a year by 2027, increasing visits to the museum’s website and online collection from 5 million to 25 million a year, and boosting in-person visits by school children from 37,500 a year in 2019, pre-pandemic, to 100,000 a year.

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.

Other elements of the new plan include a deeper engagement with Northeast Ohio’s Indigenous community that will include a “land acknowledgment,’’ a statement that the museum is aware that it occupies territory from which the original inhabitants had been dispossessed by colonial settlement. Specific language and programs associated with the project will be announced in the near future, Griswold said.

A sense of stability

Perhaps more than anything, the new plan emphasizes the museum’s ability to think clearly about its future after a turbulent, 15-year period from 1999 to 2014 in which it was led by three directors, with four yearlong intervals under interim leadership. The museum completed its expansion and renovation during the period but lacked a sense of direction and stability.

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.

Griswold said he’s in early discussions with the board about possibly extending his tenure, and that he intends to retire from the museum without taking another position elsewhere.

In the meantime, Griswold said he’s taking an eight-week sabbatical from late September to late November to travel, see art, and consider the future of art museums.

In 2024, Griswold will become the director with the longest tenure since Evan H. Turner, who led the museum from 1983 to 1993. The directors with the longest tenures were William Milliken, 1930-1958; and Sherman Lee, 1958-1983.

“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.”

Making progress

A 2021 internal report states that the museum made significant progress over the past 5 years toward realizing 10-year goals in the 2017 strategic plan, despite the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic over the past two years. They include:

- Adding $140 million worth of art to the museum’s permanent collection of 64,000 objects, a major step toward a goal of adding $1 billion worth of art. New acquisitions include the collection of Clevelanders Joseph and Nancy Keithley, worth more than $100 million, now on view in a special exhibition.

- Achieving on-site attendance of nearly 865,000 in the museum’s 2019 fiscal year, showing that reaching an attendance of 1 million could be within reach.

- Increasing annual gifts from $7.5 million to $11.8 million, reaching toward the goal of $15 million a year.

- Completing the Community Arts Center in the Pivot Center off West 25th Street in Tremont, near the Clark-Fulton neighborhood.

- Completing a master plan for the museum’s grounds in University Circle, restoring the Holden Terrace staircase in Wade Lagoon, and the Smith Family Gateway, a 7-acre park along Doan Brook west of the museum.

Building on its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the museum said that between 2015 and 2021, it increased the number of employees who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, or person of color from 20% to 33% percent in its conservation department; from 16% to 35% in the curatorial department; from 18% to 44% in its education department; and from 15% to 18% in administration.

Looking ahead, Griswold said the museum wants to expand educational opportunities for minorities to launch careers in art history and museums by offering scholarships, internships, and other programs.

Full immersion

The museum is also looking to repeat the success of “Revealing Krishna,’’ an exhibition on the restoration of its seventh-century Cambodian sculpture, “Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan,’’ that included immersive digital displays with augmented reality headsets.

“We know there is a public appetite for immersive experiences,’’ Griswold said.

Emulating traveling exhibits such as the animated “Immersive Van Gogh’' installation, staged in a vacant factory building off East 72nd Street in Cleveland, “doesn’t make sense for us,’’ he said, but the museum would “figure out a smart, CMA-specific way’' to create more immersive exhibits, perhaps as often as once a year.

Griswold said the museum is still engaged in discussions with Case Western Reserve University about how to develop the 4.2-acre East Bell property across East Boulevard from the museum.

The museum and CWRU bought the site from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2013, with long-term plans to develop it. Griswold said that the museum has considered relocating its Ingalls Library to the site, but no decisions have been made.

More immediately, the museum plans soon to take over ownership and complete the operation of the Transformer Station gallery in Ohio City, a joint project in which the museum has collaborated with collectors Fred and Laura Bidwell. Fred Bidwell, a museum trustee, is the founding CEO of the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, running through Oct. 2.

The museum is also planning on renovating the Horace Kelley Art Foundation Lobby, better known as the museum’s North Lobby. Originally built as part of the 1970 Education Wing designed by architect Marcel Breuer, the lobby is the main point of entry for museum visitors. But Griswold said the architecturally significant space has come to look “very tired.’’

Griswold described the project as a central component of the new strategic plan, aimed at making visitors feel more welcome as soon as they enter the museum.

“The opportunity to make that space sing, from an architectural standpoint, and to make it welcoming from a psychological standpoint, and to make it more efficient and functional from a purely operational standpoint is enormous,’’ Griswold said. “I’m really excited about that.”