William Griswold (museum director)


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.

Early life and education

Griswold was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in, although he was raised in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. His father, Robert Edward Griswold, was a clinical chemist, while his mother was a homemaker. The family regularly went on road trips to cities for museum visits.
He received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, Despite planning to attend law school, he graduated with a degree in art history at Trinity College, and also studied French and English literature. Although his interests spanned a variety of periods and disciplines, his specialty was in Florentine drawings of the early Renaissance period, which he studied as a graduate student. In 1988, he completed his doctoral dissertation on the collected drawings of Piero di Cosimo, who Griswold was drawn to due to the painter's "originality and eccentricity". He would first visit the Cleveland Museum of Art as a graduate student in the 1980s, where he would later serve as director. He admired its collection of Asian art as well as The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew by Caravaggio then held at the museum.

Career

Early curatorial positions

Griswold first worked as an assistant and later associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the museum's department of drawings and prints, from 1988 to 1995. He then held the position of the Charles W. Engelhard Curator at the Morgan Library, in addition to serving as the head of the museum's department of drawings and prints, from 1995 to 2001. At the Morgan Library, he oversaw the creation of the museum's Drawing Study Center and helped organize the museum's first major exhibition of 20th-century art and exhibitions in 1998 and 2002.
He then became an associate director of the J. Paul Getty Museum from 2001 to 2004, working with the museum's six curatorial departments. In collaboration with Peggy Fogelman, then the museum's assistant director for education and interpretation, he worked on projects such as a family space and the expansion of education programs at the museum. He then became the museum's interim director and chief curator in 2004.

Directorial career

Griswold succeeded Evan Mauer as the next director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2005, after a five-month search by the museum. At the start of his directorship, the museum was nearing completion of a $113 million expansion that was designed by American architect Michael Graves. His tenure continued until 2007, during which he worked to complete the expansion and oversee the installation of more than thirty of the museum's galleries as well as a funding campaign supporting the museum's endowment. Kaywin Feldman succeeded him as director in 2007.
He returned to the Morgan Library & Museum as its director from 2007 to 2014. Griswold's agenda as director focused on the growth of the museum's collections, exhibitions, and curatorial departments. He oversaw the installation of temporary sculptures in the museum's atrium and presented exhibitions of contemporary art in an effort to reach younger audiences, as well as projects digitizing the Morgan's collections and restoring the McKim Building, which originally housed the museum. In 2012, he hired Joel Smith, formerly of the Princeton University Art Museum, to serve as the museum's first photography curator.

Cleveland Museum of Art

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 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 to by 2013. In July 2017, he signed a seven-year contract extending his tenure at the museum through 2024.
initiative
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.

Other activities

Griswold is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and chairs the organization's task force on archaeological material and ancient art. He has been the president of the Master Drawings Association and served on the boards of the American Friends of the Shanghai Museum, the American Trust for the British Library, and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Awards and honors