Katharine Lee Reid, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art from 2000-2005, has died at age 80

Katharine Lee Reid, led the Cleveland Museum of Art from 2000 to 2005. Reid died September 22, 2022, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina — Katharine Lee Reid, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art from 2000 to 2005, died Thursday in Chapel Hill, N.C., from complications following heart surgery, family members said Tuesday. She was 80.

Reid, the daughter of Sherman E. Lee, who led the Cleveland museum from 1958 to 1983, took the helm a year after the sudden death in 1999 of former museum director Robert P. Bergman, who led the museum for six years.

Reid’s accomplishments at the museum included launching an 8-year, $320 million expansion and renovation, designed by architect Rafael Vinoly, that transformed the institution by upgrading and enlarging its galleries and giving the museum a central atrium.

Reid referred to the atrium as the equivalent of an Italian piazza that would give Cleveland a year-round civic gathering space in the heart of University Circle, the city’s educational, medical and cultural hub.

Katharine Caecilia Lee Reid was born on December 12, 1941, in Detroit Michigan, the first child of Sherman E. Lee, and Ruth Alida Ward.

In addition to her tenure in Cleveland, she also led the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and was deputy director of The Art Institute of Chicago. An obituary provided by her family noted that she was one of the few women of her generation to hold such positions.

Reid served as a president of the Association of Art Museum Directors as well as on the boards of the American Association of Museums, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the National Conference for Community and Justice, and the American Federation of Arts.

Reid was a graduate of Laurel School in Shaker Heights. She graduated summa cum laude from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and later earned a master’s degree in art history from Harvard, a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Institut d’Art et d’Archeologie in the Sorbonne, and a Ford Foundation grant to study museum curatorship at the Toledo Museum of Art, where her museum career began.

Reid later served as curator of the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and then as a curator at Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina. She returned to Chicago in 1982, where she became assistant director and then deputy director at the Art Institute of Chicago.

During her time in Chicago, she met and married Bryan Seaborne Reid, Jr.

Starting in 1991 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reid led the museum through a recession and boosted attendance and outreach programs specifically directed toward Richmond’s African-American community, according to the obituary.

She also initiated a $110-million expansion and renovation of the museum.

Reid’s achievements in Cleveland included establishing a separate curatorial department of African art and creating the museum’s first full-time position for a curator of contemporary art.

During her retirement Reid served on the national advisory board of the Ackland Museum, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, and the board of advisors for the Nasher Museum at Duke University.

At the Ackland, she also led the establishment of the Ruth and Sherman Lee Endowment for Asian Art, in honor of her parents.

Reid’s honors include honorary degrees from Knox College and UNC Chapel Hill, and membership in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la Republique Francaise.

Katharine was predeceased by her parents, Sherman Emery Lee and Ruth Alida Ward Lee, and by her husband, Bryan Seaborne Reid, Jr. as well as two stepchildren and her first husband, John Webster Keefe.

Survivors include Reid’s sisters, Margaret Lee Gray Bachenheimer (Steven); and Elizabeth Lee Chiego (William); and her brother, Thomas Weaver Lee (Christie).

The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The Ruth and Sherman Lee Fund for Asian Art at The Ackland Art Museum, 101 S. Columbia Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27599.

A memorial celebration will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 15 at Hill Hall at UNC Chapel Hill, under the auspices of the Ackland.

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