Cleveland Museum of Art’s new Community Arts Center endows West Side with a powerful new

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art has been tight-lipped for months about its plans for a new Community Arts Center on the city’s West Side.

An advance peek provided to cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer made it easy to see why. The museum wanted to make its own splash, separate and apart from the exemplary real estate project in which it is playing a key role.

Scheduled to open June 12, the Community Arts Center is an expansive, light-filled space destined to become an important new cultural anchor on the city’s West Side.

It will also be a terrific centerpiece for a $12.8 million project by Cleveland developer Rick Foran to transform the former Astrup Awning factory and warehouse into a new, 74,000-square-foot center for nonprofit arts and social service organizations.

Foran has received boatloads of media coverage for his project, located at the southeast corner of West 25th Street and Seymour Avenue, on the western fringe of Tremont, just north of the Clark-Fulton neighborhood.

Given all the attention showered on the Astrup makeover so far, it’s understandable that the museum would have wanted a moment of its own.

Point of entry

The wait has been worth it. With 24-foot-high ceilings and 19,500 square feet of light-washed gallery, studio, storage, and workshop space, the Community Arts Center will provide an inviting setting for programs aimed at children, families, and adults of all ages. Details will be available on the museum’s website, Cleveland.org.

Other tenants in the mostly century-old industrial complex include Inlet Dance Theatre; LatinUS Theater Company; La Mega 1, an online Spanish-language radio station; the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center; and the Cleveland Family Center for Missing Children and Adults. ICA Art Conservation is also planning to move there.

Within that milieu, the art museum’s space will help nudge the city’s cultural center of gravity a little bit farther to the west. That counts a lot in a city where the big art museums, the Cleveland Orchestra, and Playhouse Square, are all east of the Cuyahoga River, either in downtown or University Circle.

“I think it’s absolutely fantastic that we have this constellation of organizations that are serving local audiences in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood,’’ said museum Director William Griswold.

The Community Arts Center adds a second West Side presence for the art museum, which formed a partnership in 2013 with the Transformer Station gallery, about a mile to the north in Ohio City.

The Transformer station — a project of museum trustee and arts entrepreneur Fred Bidwell, and his wife, Laura Bidwell, that the museum will eventually acquire — has enabled the institution to expand its programming in contemporary art.

Jennifer DePrizio, the museum’s interim director of public and academic engagement, said the Community Arts Center is intended to provide a point of entry for West Side residents who might otherwise feel hesitant to make the trek to University Circle.

“It’s a way to introduce people to the museum in a way that might feel more comfortable to them at first,’’ she said.

The facility is designed specifically to appeal to residents in nearby Clark-Fulton, which boasts the region’s highest concentration of Hispanic residents. DePrizio said the museum will soon hire a bilingual manager for the new center.

Symbol of change

In many ways, the design of the museum’s center makes it a Cleveland-specific symbol of urban revitalization.

The space occupies a portion of the Astrup complex added in 1983 as a windowless brick warehouse. Instead of darkness, the structure is now filled with light. Instead of storing factory products, it will become a factory of ideas and creativity accessible to all.

At an even more fundamental level, the Astrup project aims to cast a fresh light on a neighborhood traumatized in 2013 by the discovery that Ariel Castro had for more than a decade imprisoned three women in his house, just steps away on Seymour Avenue.

Based on a desire to change the image of the neighborhood, and on a signature architectural move designed for the museum’s space, Foran renamed the Astrup complex as the Pivot Center for Art, Dance, and Expression.

The architectural “pivot” comes from a series of unusual windows cut into the brick façade of the museum’s space on West 25th Street.

Joe Smith of the New York firm of Smith & Sauer, a native of Bay Village who got to know Foran’s family as a boy attending St. Ignatius High School, landed the job to renovate the Astrup complex after he got wind of the project and called Foran.

Smith said he knew he wanted to open up the windowless West 25th Street façade for the museum’s community center.

But instead of just punching windows into the bricks, he designed new, metal-clad walls that swivel clockwise around a vertical axis, opening big, floor-to-ceiling windows that jut in and out, flooding the museum’s interior with daylight.

Cognoscenti will note a precedent for Smith’s window concept in irreverent designs created in the 1970s by architect James Wines for Best Products showrooms, in which he punctured, peeled, deconstructed, and otherwise exploded the company’s traditionally dull brick boxes.

Upcoming programs

The museum’s space will function in part as the new home base for artists and residents working on floats or other projects for the institution’s big annual festivals, which include Parade the Circle, the Chalk Festival, and the Winter Lights Lantern Festival.

(Previously, the Parade the Circle workshop was housed in the brick buildings that now host the Foundry Community Rowing and Sailing Center on Columbus Road Peninsula).

The new space will also host artist residencies for community-based projects, and hold exhibitions in a soaring, 5,000-square-foot gallery that looks and feels, well, museum-quality.

The opening show in the space will focus on towering puppets, floats, and costumes created for Parade the Circle, the annual celebration that draws tens of thousands of spectators to University Circle every June.

The museum won’t be holding the big parade this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead, it is organizing eight exhibits around Cleveland, called “Parade the City.’’ Sculpture and installations related to the annual parade will be displayed starting June 12 at venues including Karamu House, the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, and the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland.

Griswold and DePrizio said that programming in the new Community Arts Center will ramp up slowly after June 12, depending on public health conditions imposed by the pandemic.

But they said they’re looking forward to partnering on special projects with their new neighbors at the Pivot Center.

“We see great opportunities for collaboration with the theater, the dance company, with the radio station, and with the other organizations that are really community-minded,’’ DePrizio said.

The feeling around the complex is mutual. The presence of arts organizations in the building, including the museum’s space, creates a sense of tranquility for clients of the Cleveland Family Center for Missing Children and Adults, for example.

Co-founded by Gina DeJesus, one of the three women held captive by Castro, and her cousin, Sylvia Colon, the organization provides support for families and police and collaborates with national organizations to fight kidnapping and human trafficking.

“We love being here,’’ Colon said.

Full circle

Colon and DeJesus said they particularly love a Parade the Circle float designed to resemble a fanciful rhinoceros in a 16th-century woodcut by Albrecht Durer.

Now ensconced in the big new gallery in the Community Arts Center, the rhino has a special resonance related to the museum’s outreach efforts on the West Side.

In 1999, the museum added wings to the rhino as a special salute to former Director Robert P. Bergman, who died that spring at age 53 after a sudden illness.

Foran said that before his death, Bergman approached his father-in-law, Paul Cassidy, then the mayor of Parma Heights, to seek help in launching an outreach initiative in Cleveland’s West Side suburbs.

With the museum now firmly established in the Pivot Center, Foran said: “I see this project as the fruition of an initiative started well over 20-something years ago when Bob Bergman approached my father-in-law.’’