The Cleveland Museum of Art Releases Updated Strategic Plan

Cleveland (September 19, 2022)—The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is pleased to announce a new strategic plan, For the Benefit of All the People: New Opportunities for Our Second Century, a comprehensive revision to its 2017 strategic plan. The result of an intensive process involving the CMA’s board of trustees and museum staff, For the Benefit of All the People takes the audience-centered approach developed in the previous iteration of the plan to a new level. The plan serves as a road map offering new opportunities to embrace and inspire all audiences while continuing the CMA’s tradition of being a community anchor, a beacon for the visual arts and one of the world’s foremost museums. 

“In the five years since the first iteration of the plan, we have accomplished many of the goals that it laid out,” said CMA Director and President William M. Griswold. “These include significant additions to the museum’s collection, launching a new International Council of Collectors, securing the largest gift of art to the museum in more than 60 years (the Keithley Collection) and diversifying our holdings with the acquisition of hundreds of works by women and artists of color. We also have inaugurated a new Community Arts Center, in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood on the west side.”  

The revised strategic plan takes an innovative approach to meeting both opportunities and challenges, crafting ways to amplify the museum’s impact throughout Northeast Ohio and beyond.  

For the Benefit of All the People lays out strategies to enhance the visitor experience, affirming the welcome that the CMA extends to all those who walk through its doors. The plan stipulates that the museum continue to diversify its holdings of works by women, as well as by Black and Indigenous artists and other people of color. In addition, it argues for expanding the collection to include select Judaica, as well as for strengthening its holding of global contemporary art. Other strategies, including the eventual appointment of a conservation scientist and a permanent conservator of photographs, are designed to augment the museum’s capacity to study and care for its world-class collection.

“From visually and intellectually exciting interventions that integrate historical and contemporary art to groundbreaking experiential exhibitions incorporating mixed reality, the CMA will continue to be a trailblazer at the intersection of art and technology,” said Griswold. “We will extend the scope of our world-class collection, in order that all audiences may at once see themselves and discover the art and culture of others when they explore our galleries online and in person.” 

The CMA prides itself on providing joyful and enriching encounters with art for schoolchildren, teens, college and university students, families and adults. The plan reiterates the million-visitor goal the CMA established before the pandemic but increases to 100,000 the number of schoolchildren that it will serve within five years. It further amplifies the museum’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, encouraging museum staff and volunteers to be ever more responsive to the needs of the community, as well as to prioritize audience research in making decisions about program content.

The museum envisions expanding its use of new technology to help bring art to life, much as it did when it incorporated augmented reality in its groundbreaking recent exhibition Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain. The revised plan calls for the CMA to leverage regional, national and international partnerships, deepening its connections both with local artists and with peer institutions throughout the country and around the world. Finally, it outlines a number of capital improvements, notably to the museum’s north Horace Kelley Art Foundation Lobby and to the Fine Arts Garden.

“By engaging the entire community, within and outside our walls, and leveraging our extended campus, we will vigorously pursue our mission, vision and promise to make art come to life for the benefit of all the people,” said Scott C. Mueller, chair of the CMA’s board.