Coventry P.E.A.C.E. Campus Artists Warn Community Center Could Dissolve Due to Landlord’s New Lease Agreement

P.E.A.C.E. Campus

The P.E.A.C.E. Campus in an undated photo.

One of Cleveland Heights’ most beloved centers for collaborative artists could go away next year due to a sudden change of terms with their landlord, its tenants said this week.

The Coventry P.E.A.C.E. Campus—full name People Enhancing a Community’s Environment—said that its landlord, Heights Libraries, will, starting in 2025, curtail its normal 18-month lease at its building on Washington Blvd. to a month-to-month agreement.

In interviews with Scene, several of P.E.A.C.E.’s nine current tenants, mostly artists and educational nonprofits, claimed that lease alteration voted on May 20 will throw a wrench into the building’s somewhat fragile funding model.

“You can’t raise money. You can’t ask for grants or government funds unless you actually have that lease in hand that says you’ll be here,” Shannon Morris, the managing director of ARTFUL, a 24-space studio hub that’s been a part of P.E.A.C.E. since 2017.

Funders “won’t talk to you until you have that piece of paper in your hand that says, ‘Yes, if we give you money, this project is viable.’

Morris is among about forty or so creatives that compose the campus’ culture, which has been a mainstay in Coventry’s main retail district since Heights Libraries purchased the place—for $1—seven years ago. Since then, P.E.A.C.E. has operated as a hub of incubation and community-driven festivity, from quirky open mics and drum circles to family movie nights and P.E.A.C.E.’s lauded Lantern Festival.

In a statement to Scene, P.E.A.C.E.’s board, led by Krista Hawthorne, said that Heights Libraries Director Nancy Levin was granted the ability to both alter the building’s rent structure, to swipe away any “unsolicited offers” to buy the building, and to conduct a study “on the future use of the building.”

“This could mean relocating the approximately 40+ artists that work in their spaces,” the release reads, “who all have spent money and resources outfitting their studios” in the past couple of years.

A sudden push out of artists calls to mind a similar episode at the ArtCraft Building on Superior Avenue, where, last spring, dozens of painters and ceramicists were given a sudden boot from their landlord after the city of Cleveland bought the building to turn the space into its new police headquarters. Cheap rents and full vacancies elsewhere often result in a feeling of anxious exodus: We have nowhere else to go otherwise.

Two calls to Heights Libraries, including to Director Nancy Levin, who helped buy the building and attract its first tenants, went unreturned on Wednesday.

A theoretical offshoot of the grassroots coalition that built the nearby playground off Washington Blvd., P.E.A.C.E. the artist colony was formed in 2017, a decade after the Coventry School that occupied its building shut its doors. When Heights Libraries, which operates the Coventry Branch across the way, took control of the building, its proprietors foresaw its own handing off in years to come.

“Our goal is for the tenants to be independent,” Levin told Patch.com in February of 2018, a month before P.E.A.C.E. opened its doors. “We don’t want to be landlords—we will be acting as a kind of incubator, supporting the tenants until they can take over ownership and management of the property themselves.”

Robin VanLear, an artist who’s rented space at P.E.A.C.E. since November 2019, recalled the specificity of Levin’s original aim. One that was derailed, in June 2020, VanLear said, by the uncertainty of where American Rescue Plan Act dollars could go.

“It was supposed to finally happen in January 2022,” she recalled. “And then at the last minute, the library decided they didn’t want to do it.”

Like all of those interviewed, VanLear felt a sense of injustice when the thought of P.E.A.C.E. shutting down was brought up. She had invested, she calculated, some $15,000 into her studio, still full of puppetry and costume wear reminiscent of the Wade Oval Parade the Circle event VanLear helped kickstart with the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1990.

And, like the ghost of Harvey Pekar or the spirit of Chrissie Hynde, VanLear sees separating P.E.A.C.E. from its location in Coventry as a kind of sacrilegious departure. Especially when Coventry’s retail district is suffering its own issues of vacancy.

“To me, this is like a perfect place,” she said. “I mean, we can walk outside. We can put on performances. We have all these other artists around. To me, like, it couldn’t be better.”

“And also, for me, if we lose this building, I won’t be able to afford another space,” she added. “I’ll have to pack my stuff up and go.”

If the Heights Libraries board sticks with its current lease change, then many if not all P.E.A.C.E. tenants would be moving out by the end of December.

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