Displaying items by tag: david franklin

Seven months after David Franklin abruptly resigned as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, with museum officials later saying he had lied to them about his extramarital affair with an employee, the institution has named a high-profile successor from New York, signaling a new chapter in its 98-year history. He is William M. Griswold, who has led the Morgan Library & Museum for nearly seven years. Mr. Griswold, 53, who will start his new job in the fall, said he decided to leave New York because he relishes running a bigger institution, with one of the most encyclopedic collections in the country.

“All told, I’ve been at the Morgan for 13 years,” Mr. Griswold said, including his years as head of its drawings department, from 1995 to 2001, as well as his years as director, from 2008. “I’m ready for my last big challenge.” Mr. Griswold also ran the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for two years.

Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and the Cleveland Museum of Art announced a joint venture that will advance both institutions and prepare future curators, scholars, museum directors and academic leaders for careers in the arts. The endeavor was inspired by Cleveland Museum of Art trustee Nancy Keithley and Case Western Reserve trustee Joseph Keithley. The couple has committed $15 million to bring The Nancy and Joseph Keithley Institute for Art History to fruition.

Case Western and the Cleveland Museum have been longtime collaborators and the highlight of the Keithley Institute is its reimagined joint doctoral program that the museum and university first developed together in 1967. The program emphasizes object-oriented study, which entails seeing objects firsthand as well as participating in the curating process and other aspects of museum operation. The Keithleys’ generous donation will provide graduate students stipends and travel fellowships as well as compensation for curriculum development, teaching and collection seminars.

David Franklin, the Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, said, “We are honored that Nancy and Joseph Keithley chose to help us realize our shared dreams of a dynamic, world-class institute. Their gift is not a gift of collaboration, but also the opportunity to realize incomparable opportunities for students, faculty, staff and the public.”

On January 21, 2013, the Cleveland Museum of Art opened Gallery One, an interactive gallery that brings together art and technology to enhance as well as personalize each museum visitor’s experience. Gallery One features the largest multi-touch screen in the United States, which displays images of over 3,500 objects from the institution’s permanent collection. Known as the Collection Wall, the touchscreen spans 40 feet and helps patrons create their own tactile tour of the museum while rotating works according to theme, time period, and technique.

Gallery One, which includes works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), and Chuck Close (b. 1940), employs different hands-on activities to engage visitors using the power of technology. For example, one game asks viewers to recreate the poses of sculptures in the museum’s collection; the ArtLens ipad application illustrates how works of art were made, where they came from, and what inspired their creation. The ArtLens application uses image recognition software and allows visitors to scan objects and access additional multimedia content such as audio tours and educational information for up to 9 hours after their visit.

David Franklin, the Cleveland Museum’s Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director, said, “Gallery One offers an unparalleled experience for visitors of all ages. The space connects art and people, art and ideas, and people with people…we are especially proud to lead the way internationally in using technology to enhance and customize the art museum experience.”

On November 5^th, the Cleveland Museum of Art will auction off one of its six Claude Monet paintings in New York. Wheat Field (1881) carries an estimated price of $5–$7 million and the museum hopes to use the funds from the sale to strengthen its early 20^th century European painting and sculpture collection, an area that has been lacking.

The Museum decided to auction Wheat Fields shortly after David Franklin was named the Museum’s director in 2010. Franklin did not think the painting could hold its own next to to the other five Monets in the museum’s collection including a widely admired Water Lily painting and the seminal, Red Kerchief.

Since Wheat Field was donated to the museum in 1947 as an unrestricted gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon, the museum is able to sell the painting without fear of complaint from the donor’s family. The Museum would like to acquire a painting by The Scream artist, Edvard Munch, or Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneering Russian abstractionist, to help round out their collection.

Over the last five years, the Cleveland Museum of Art has been at work on one of the largest building programs of any art institution in the country, a $350 million project that has been unveiled in sleek new stages and will be completed by 2013, adding 35,000 more square feet of gallery space.

But the museum has also been building in less visible ways and is set to announce on Monday the acquisition of two high-profile ancient artifacts that seem certain to draw attention not only to the institution’s expansion but also to the complicated long-running debate about antiquities collecting by museums.