KOREA FOUNDATION

The Cleveland Museum of Art boasts one of the most significant collections of Korean art in the United States, with its holdings of Korean work dating back to the museum’s very opening in 1916. In 2016, the museum’s centennial, it opened its Korea Foundation Gallery, a dedicated exhibition space for Korean art created with support from the Korea Foundation and the National Museum of Korea. William M. Griswold, Director and President of the Cleveland Museum of Art, visited Korea in March to meet with officials from Korean museums, galleries, and other organizations and discuss opportunities for collaboration and cooperation. He sat down with the KF to talk about his museum and its role in introducing the American public to Korean arts and culture.

I understand the Cleveland Museum of Art first opened a Korean art section in 2013, although it has been collecting Korean art since 1915.

The museum has collected Asian art since its incorporation in 1913. The museum opened its doors to the public in 1916, but by then, the museum had already acquired its first Korean works of art, a number of paintings attributed to Korean artists of the Joseon period.
  But we began to collect Korean art in earnest in the latter teens and 1920s when we acquired as a gift a significant collection of Korean celadons, mostly from the Goryeo period, but also some early Joseon pieces derived from the collection of John L. Severance, son of Louis Severance, who established Severance Hospital in 1904 in Seoul. Since then the collection has continued to grow. It’s still relatively small—we have only about 400 pieces—but many of them are of the greatest rarity and real significance.

What are the main focuses of the museum’s holding of Korean art? Which periods are they from?

Ours is an encyclopedic museum in the sense that we collect art from every period and every place. And within the field of Korean art, we collect art from all periods and in every medium. But the strength of our collection is in the Goryeo and Joseon periods. The most outstanding group is our collection of Goryeo celadons, but we also have Goryeo Buddhist paintings and metalwork and Joseon paintings, porcelains, and other objects.

Which exhibits have attracted the most attention from the public?

The Korean gallery is the space through which we rotate primarily our permanent collection. There are a number of installations every year, with consideration of the fact that the collection is light sensitive. The rotation or installation of our Korea Foundation Gallery that probably garnered the most attention was our 2016 installation after the reconfiguration of the space with the support of the National Museum of Korea. It was a beautiful rotation that incorporated a key loan, a folding screen from Samsung’s museum collections that depicted the celebrations that accompanied the 40th birthday of the Joseon King Sunjo.
  We also have a very active exhibition program that spans the breadth of our collection. It was in one of our other exhibition spaces that the exhibition Chaekgeori: Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens took place. It was a beautiful exhibition accompanied by programming dedicated to Korean culture of various sorts. There were workshops on Korean papermaking and a film series on Korean film. Once a month we host a very large evening event that is in part about our collection and exhibitions and in part a dance party for young visitors. We call it MIX. And our MIX, in connection with the chaekgeori exhibition, was devoted to K-pop. So our interest in Korean culture is broad, and the exhibition was extremely popular—it was an absolutely gorgeous exhibition that introduced new audiences to a distinctively Korean genre of painting.

Can you tell us about this year’s upcoming exhibitions at the Korea Foundation Gallery?

Within the next year, we will continue to introduce new rotations from the permanent collection of our Korea Foundation Gallery. We will also incorporate loans from other collections, including private collections, in that space. But I’m really looking further out at major exhibitions of Korean art in our temporary exhibition galleries. We are currently exploring a number of ideas. One of the things I’ll be doing with our curator, who will be joining me here later this week, is to discuss with colleagues here possible exhibitions on Korean embroidery and on the role of women as practitioners and patrons of embroidery, as well as an ambitious exhibition on Korean funerary traditions and related arts. I’m looking at more distant horizons than just the next year, envisioning a vibrant program of internationally significant exhibitions of Korean art at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Written by Robert Koehler