Deborah Gribbon, Interim Director

Deborah Gribbon was appointed Interim Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art in the summer of 2009 and arrived at the museum in September. She was most recently the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum and vice president of the J. Paul Getty Trust for four years, and a curator and deputy director there for 16 years before that. Under her leadership, the Getty acquired more than 500 works of art, developed an ambitious program of temporary exhibitions, and strove to make the collection more meaningful to a broad public. She redefined the museum’s approach to education and oversaw the creation of an advanced multimedia system for providing information about the collection to visitors. She oversaw much of the construction of the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center in Los Angeles, and therefore has deep and recent experience with a major building project.

Prior to her time in Los Angeles, she was a curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for eight years, and, while a graduate student, taught courses in art history. Her doctorate and master’s degrees are from Harvard, her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College. 

I am truly excited—and honored—to serve as the interim director during such a critical juncture in the history of the museum—and I thank the museum and the public of Cleveland for such a warm welcome.

In the past ten years the museum has made superb acquisitions and organized compelling exhibitions; it has produced innovative performing arts and film offerings; it has organized exciting community festivals and presented a broad variety of educational programs. Most remarkably, it has embarked upon and completed substantial portions of an ambitious, transformative renovation and expansion project. Making this all happen requires significant ongoing support from the community. From my perspective as interim director, this track record gives me great confidence that the staff, leaders, and supporters of the Cleveland Museum of Art are committed to the museum’s ongoing success and are more than up to the task of making it happen.

I must also say that, even as one who had long been familiar with the Cleveland collection by reputation and by seeing objects in traveling exhibitions, the experience of walking through these galleries really is breathtaking. The quality of the works is so high, the installations so beautiful—few communities in the world have such an asset in their midst, much less one that is open to the public free of charge. Furthermore (its stellar international reputation notwithstanding), this museum exists primarily to bring great art to the people of its own community, which to me is a source of great inspiration and, I believe, one of the factors that has made this institution great. I look forward to our time together.

Sincerely,

Deborah Gribbon, Interim Director

© 2009 The Cleveland Museum of Art