page_title: William Griswold (museum director)
section_title: Cleveland Museum of Art
hierarchical_section_title: William Griswold (museum director) / Career / Cleveland Museum of Art
caption_attribution_description: View of The Cleveland Museum of Art's touch interactive ArtLens Wall featuring "Open Access Highlights" from The Cleveland Museum of Art's Open Access program. With people.
context_page_description: William M. Griswold is an American museum director and curator. He assumed his current position at the Cleveland Museum of Art in May 2014, succeeding David Franklin as the ninth director of the museum. He previously held various curatorial and directorial positions at institutions across the United States, including the Met, the Morgan Library & Museum in Los Angeles, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
  In his tenure at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he has overseen initiatives to grow and diversify the museum's audience and address barriers present for members of underrepresented groups within its operations. In the two instances that museum staff discovered the questionable provenance of one of its objects, he has personally led negotiations resulting in their return to their respective countries of origin.
context_section_description: The Cleveland Museum of Art announced its selection of Griswold as the museum's next director in May 2014. His appointment followed the departure of director David Franklin as well as the completion of an eight-year $320 million renovation and expansion designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly. Commenting on the circumstances preceding his appointment in a 2017 interview with Lee Rosenbaum, a culture journalist that has written for The Wall Street Journal, Griswold stated:
  I came to Cleveland after a period of repeated changes in the director's office over a number of years... I had incurred a real moral obligation and to serve that institution [the Cleveland Museum of Art] for a good, long period of time, and to break the cycle of departures. It wouldn't be right to consider anything else right now.
  Griswold assumed his role as museum director in August 2014. In his tenure, he filled vacancies left by curators during or in the aftermath of Franklin's directorship, and led the development of initiatives aimed at growing and diversifying its audience and eliminating "barriers for historically underrepresented groups in every aspect of the museum's operations". For the yearlong celebration of the museum's centennial through 2016, he coordinated with museum staff to produce events and exhibitions, during which the museum announced the completion of its funding campaign for the Viñoly-designed expansion and renovation, which increased the museum's size from 389,000 square feet (36,100 m²) to 588,000 square feet (54,600 m²) by 2013. In July 2017, he signed a seven-year contract extending his tenure at the museum through 2024.
  Notable acquisitions made by the museum under his tenure include dozen pieces of pre-Columbian gold in 2016 and a bequest of Japanese and Korean art from the estate of George Gund III. In two instances, the museum discovered the questionable provenance of one of its objects, following research by staff members. These objects were a tenth-century Cambodian sculpture of Hanuman and an ancient Roman portrait of Drusus Julius Caesar, both purchased by the museum in good faith. Griswold led negotiations with the governments of Italy and Cambodia that resulted in the return of the objects to Cambodia and Italy. The resolution of the situation with the government of Cambodia also resulted in the museum obtaining a fragment critical to the reconstruction of a Krishna statue.
  On January 23, 2019, Griswold announced that the museum had released more than thirty thousand images of its works as well as data for 61,500 works from its collection into the public domain as part of its Open Access initiative. Both material in the public domain and material with copyright restrictions were released using the Creative Commons Zero public copyright license. On March 25, 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum announced its intention to cancel all of its events until June 30. Consequently, Griswold established a task force to develop protocols for the museum's reopening.
caption: A digital display highlighting works released under the Open Access initiative
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