The Cleveland Museum of Art announced Friday it has raised $480 million in cash, pledges and artworks since 2023 in a fundraising campaign designed to reach $600 million by 2027. In other words, it has pocketed 80 percent of its goal.
The museum said the four-year campaign is the largest in its history, the largest of any museum in Ohio and one of the largest in the U.S. in recent decades.
“This is a reflection of Cleveland's incredible tradition of philanthropy,’’ William Griswold, the museum’s director, said in an interview before the announcement.
Griswold said the success of the campaign so far reflects “the importance that this community attaches to the great cultural institutions that serve the city, and [is] a reflection of the commitment of our audiences to the institution and to free general admission. I really think this is a Cleveland story.’’
Next chapter
The current Cleveland museum campaign is designed to permanently fund 21 curatorial and top administrative positions, plus the museum’s exhibition program, Griswold said.
The museum produces dozens of exhibitions a year, including shows that assemble works loaned from other museums around the world. New money to support them is "essential,'' Griswold said, "because the cost of exhibitions, our most visible and in some ways, our most important single program, are only going up."
Other goals include beefing up art conservation, supporting the museum’s library and boosting digital innovation. The campaign will establish a new position for a conservator of photography and a prize for photography.
Griswold said the campaign will also ensure the museum will continue to provide free admission, a hallmark since it opened 110 years ago.
Roughly $40 million will be reserved for capital projects, including a planned refurbishment of the Fountain of the Waters and Zodiac Garden in the Fine Arts Garden south of the museum. An overhaul of Wade Lagoon is also planned.
Of the $600 million goal, $200 million will comprise gifts of works of art that meet the institution’s exacting levels of artistic quality and art historical significance.
“I feel excited, proud and so pleased to be a part of this community at this time,’’ Griswold said. “I mean, this is one of the most exciting things that I've ever been involved in.’’
Heavy hitter
The biggest American art museum fundraising campaigns in recent decades have included $720 million raised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for its new expansion and renovation as well as $858 million raised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998-2004.
Endowments at American art museums fluctuate in value depending on market conditions and reporting periods, but an online search showed that the Cleveland Museum of Art, with $1.1 billion, is the likely sixth richest in the U.S. It’s behind the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Bringing stability
Griswold, 65, became the ninth director of the Cleveland museum in 2014, after leading the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and serving in high posts at the Getty in Los Angeles.
Griswold came to Cleveland after the turbulent, three-year tenure of David Franklin, who resigned in 2013 after trustees learned he had concealed an affair with an employee.
Griswold’s arrival also followed 15 years of high turnover in which the museum had three directors and four periods of interim leadership.
In 2016, the museum completed a $320 million fundraising campaign, worth roughly $466 million in 2026 dollars. The money paid for the large-scale expansion and renovation the museum completed in 2013.
The expansion included the museum’s 39,000 square-foot Ames Family Atrium, three new wings, the renovation of its original 1916 building, a 33 percent increase in gallery space and the Gallery One interactive learning center. The museum also added a new café, restaurant and gift shop.
Griswold said that the earlier campaign focused largely on paying construction bills, but it didn’t account for the higher costs of running a facility that had increased 51 percent in size from 389,000 to 588,000 square feet and an audience that had grown significantly in size.
The current campaign is meant to “ensure that the future is as bright as the recent past has been,’’ Griswold said.
He emphasized that on his watch, the museum hasn’t experienced deficits. In 2020, the museum averted a potential $6.2 million deficit during the COVID-19 pandemic by raising $4 million in new revenues and reducing staff through layoffs, buyouts and voluntary departures.
The current tally
A strategic plan unveiled in 2017 established 10-year goals that included nearly doubling attendance to 1 million and growing the endowment to $1.25 billion. The museum is now approaching those two benchmarks.
Last year, Griswold said, the museum reached annual attendance of more than 800,000, its biggest annual total. The current $1.1 billion value of the endowment does not include the $180 million in cash, pledges and promised bequests raised so far as part of the current campaign.
In all, Griswold said, the campaign has netted $351.1 million in cash and pledges, some of which will help pay for current expenses, plus the donation or promised donations of works of art worth nearly $130 million.
Some gifts have already been publicized, albeit without calling them part of the fundraising campaign.
Those include $25 million from the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation, a 2024 donation guided by former museum board chair Ellen Stirn Mavec, acting in her role as president of the Smith Foundation.
Mavec’s gift, which came in the form of a challenge, helped the museum raise an additional $100 million, including two gifts worth more than $20 million apiece, and numerous donations of up to $10 million.
Griswold said that the gift and promised gift of more than $100 million in art from the collection of Joseph and Nancy Keithley, announced in 2020, also counts as part of the current campaign. The donation included a large group of late 19th and early 20th century paintings by Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Edouard Vuillard.
Third big cash infusion
The current campaign marks the museum’s third big cash infusion since 1958, when it received a $34 million bequest from the estate of iron ore, coal and shipping magnate Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., worth $495 million in 2026 dollars.
Income from that gift is split between art purchases and operating costs, a pattern the museum continues today to ensure that it can preserve, study and display art, not merely acquire it.
Looking ahead, Griswold said, "there are definitely areas of the collection that could be greatly strengthened."
They include modern and contemporary art, which the museum started collecting later than some of its peers, he said.
Adding works of ancient Greek and Roman art could also help the museum, Griswold said. But he said, “that's a very difficult field in which to collect today.’’
Countries including Greece, Italy and Turkey have worked to repatriate looted and illegally exported artworks in recent decades. The Cleveland museum, which has voluntarily returned antiquities to Italy, Turkey and Cambodia, has used some of the related negotiations to achieve collaborative programming and loans for exhibitions.
For Griswold, the fundraising campaign marks a major achievement, but he said it’s not a swan song. His contract has been renewed through January 2028 and will renew annually after that.
“I'm not likely to be here forever, but my focus right now is this campaign,’’ he said. “It's an effort that I'm really, really proud to be involved in.’’
