By Carlo Wolff
On Oct. 24, Shannon Morris stood onstage before an audience at Cuyahoga Community College’s Eastern Campus as long-time colleague Robin VanLear draped a Cleveland Arts Prize medal around her neck. The medal honors her leadership of Artful Cleveland, a nonprofit collective Morris established in 2017.
What should have been an occasion of pure joy was tainted by uncertainty, however. Artful and its tenants have to vacate the Coventry PEACE Building in Cleveland Heights by Jan. 31, 2025, by order of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library, the building’s landlord. That move will end Artful’s run as manager of a community artistic hub on the Coventry PEACE Campus.
But it also marks a beginning.
“We are now being forcibly displaced from our beloved PEACE building and are actively seeking a permanent home,” Morris told the crowd at the annual awards ceremony in Highland Hills. “This will take time, fresh board members and a great deal of money. However, we are not deterred. This award has strengthened my resolve.”
The Cleveland Arts Prize awarded Morris its Robert P. Bergman Prize, named for the fifth director of the Cleveland Museum of Art who was known for his democratic attitude toward art and culture. The honor was a surprise, Morris told the audience.
“Artful became more than I ever dreamed as a part of the arts, culture and education hub in the Coventry PEACE Building, a magical place filled with generosity and possibility,” she told attendees. She ended her brief remarks with shout-outs to Artful tenant VanLear, her grant-writing partner, and to Artful’s board president Brady Dindia, a graphic designer and marketing specialist.
In VanLear’s introduction of Morris, she told the audience, “In Shannon’s perfect world, the arts would be a lucrative profession. Studios would be safe, affordable, accessible and close to home. Imagine a day care center in the middle of a collective of art, music and dance studios. There is no single age that is the acceptable age and no individual race, ethnicity or sexual orientation that is what is accepted. They all are.”
THE SPACE ISSUE
A conceptual artist from Cleveland Heights, Morris has known for some time that Artful’s days at the PEACE campus were numbered. Nevertheless, she says she was furious when the hammer came down Oct. 8. A Cleveland Heights City Council meeting had been convened to discuss whether Cleveland Heights and University Heights could work with the library board to keep the quirky building as a hub for arts, education and culture. Instead, the library board sounded a death knell.
Over the past several years, the library board has said Artful failed to meet its financial obligations. In a statement on its website, library board president Vikas Turakhia says the board had “implemented a range of different management models, including below-market rents and individual tenant leases.
“Despite these good-faith and extensive efforts by the library, the tenants, Coventry PEACE, Inc., and CRESCO (a management firm), the building’s operational and capital requirements have consistently and substantially exceeded revenue and cash flow, which in turn have required the library to repeatedly cover funding shortfalls,” the statement says.
The building also needs close to $3 million in roof repair and HVAC work, according to a report from CRESCO.
Artful has countered, noting its nine core tenants pay $150,000 in rental fees yearly to the library system, has improved the building and maintains it. It also offered to buy the building, but the board says it’s not for sale.
“All of the tenants have met their financial responsibility,” Dindia says. “We have all lived up to all of our financial obligations under every version of every lease libraries has issued to tenants.”
Toward the end of the Oct. 8 meeting, despite entreaties from elected officials, Library Director Nancy Levin said the building must be emptied and would be “mothballed.” On Oct. 21, library board members passed a measure that will terminate leases on Jan. 31.
Artful is looking for a new, permanent home that it would own, says Morris. Looking hard.
“This award has fortified me and reignited the passion that I will draw upon to build an even better Artful,” Morris vows.
CASTING A WIDE NET
“We’re looking anywhere,” Morris says in a recent interview at her art-filled home in Cleveland Heights. “There’s really very little available for the size that we are because we’re quite large. We use probably 10,000 square feet just for our artists. That doesn’t include flex space. So, we’ve been looking at anything that comes up. If someone calls us and says, ‘Come here,’ we’ll go look. We have not found anything yet.”
The original Artful tenants hope to land a space that accommodates all of them, but each organization or artist must do what they need. “If they have to find a space by themselves, they have to find a space by themselves,” Morris says. “They can’t just close up when we have to leave.”
She hopes that doesn’t happen.
“My job has been easier being with all these people that have experience in running an organization,” Morris says. “We have shared knowledge and resources, and it’s just better together.”
The seeds of Artful took root about nine years ago when Morris, a single mother with two daughters, was looking for studio space big enough for her to collaborate with others on her art. “Even in my own work, I collaborate a lot because I create work that’s not necessarily within my skill set,” she says.
“I make whatever I want,” says Morris, a fine art photography graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in New York City, where she lived for 10 years. “I’ll have an idea for 10 years until it’s time to do it.”
Her work, both two- and three-dimensional, is witty, varied and topical. It spans mandala-like riffs on Mother’s Day, wooden, wall-mounted miniature houses, and abstract ceramics that vamp on monumental urban architecture.
Painters David King and Sarah Curry are both members of the Artful board. King says Morris’ collages have a unique sense of balance, probably acquired in her study of photography, “when arranging things through a viewfinder on the camera is primary.”
In a CAN Journal review of a show by Morris in April, artist and arts advocate Liz Maugans wrote “as Mother’s Day approaches, (Morris) offers a heroic shrine of trophies stacked to form a pyramid that is both precarious and solid. Shannon, a long-time estate sale and thrift shopper, renews the thrifted trophies in a way that reveals presence, strength, appreciation and joy. The word MOTHER is prominently spelled out at the base of the piece, anchoring the vintage trophies, which are adorned with other ribbons and regalia honoring moms. As a mother herself, Shannon knows all too well how it feels to be invisible and unappreciated.”
UNAPPRECIATED NO LONGER
When Effie Nunes, executive director of the Cleveland Arts Prize, called to tell Morris she’d won the Bergman prize, Morris was stunned. She thought Nunes was calling her for a CAP prize recommendation for someone else and didn’t find out until that day that VanLear had nominated her and that others had written letters of recommendation.
“It was a complete and total secret until the day that Effie called me,” Morris says. “And then I couldn’t tell anybody until they announced it. So I had no idea this was happening, and it’s still a little bit surreal. I feel like I haven’t done enough to get it.”
That’s not a widely shared opinion. And, Artful isn’t going away quietly.
Coventry PEACE Campus has its Lantern Festival scheduled for Dec. 14 – the final event hosted at the building. The Coventry Elementary School Reunion program is scheduled for 2 to 5 p.m., and the festival will include a tour, lantern-making workshops and a lantern procession down Coventry Road.
“I would hope that it (Artful) remains a Cleveland Heights entity primarily, but I can see its DNA spread to other areas,” says artist Juan Quirarte. “What made Coventry PEACE impactful was the marriage of unique location, unique building and unique artists/organizations. Artful can definitely relocate and prosper, but I feel that particular location – which I am fond of, as a neighbor – will suffer as a result. I applaud city council for seeing the value added of Coventry PEACE and trying to broker a solution. Sadly, it wasn’t in the cards.”
For now, Morris is practicing the art of purpose driven by necessity. She has no shows planned. She’s wearing her advocacy hat full-time. Her goal is to find a new home for Artful and keep money coming in.
If Artful doesn’t have a home by Jan. 31, it will have to shut down, she says.
Not if Shannon Morris can help it.
Publisher’s note: If you or someone you know has potential space for Artful Cleveland to relocate to, contact Shannon Morris at shannon@artfulcleveland.org.
Coventry PEACE Building tenants*
- Artful Cleveland
- Building Bridges Arts Collaborative
- Cleveland Heights Teachers Union
- Coventry P.E.A.C.E.
- DANCECleveland
- Do Good Day Hub
- FutureHeights
- Grace Communion Cleveland
- Lake Erie Ink
- People’s Choice Payee Services
- Reaching Heights
- The Singers’ Club of Cleveland
- * According to Shannon Morris, Artful is one of the 12 tenants facing eviction from the building. Out of those 12, nine are being evicted by Jan. 31, 2025. Three newer ones may have a little more time: DANCECleveland, Do Good Day Hub and People’s Choice Payee Services, Morris tells Canvas.
