The Creative Class Speaks – Eight members of the so-called "creative class" discuss their work and their reasons for living in Cleveland.

CAN THE CREATIVE CLASS SAVE CLEVELAND AND IF THEY DID, COULD THEY AFFORD TO STAY HERE?

By Michael Gill The Cleveland Free Times

On the one hand, Cleveland has something to be proud of – lots of cheap work space and a cost of living that allow artists to produce. On the other, the city seems to revel in attempts to legislate revival on the backs of people near the bottom of the economic ladder.

"First of all, the idea of a creative class turns my stomach."

So begins a conversation with Cleveland filmmaker and promoter Matthew T. about what Cleveland offers the people who are in the business of creating beauty, truth, illusion and new ideas. But back to him later.

The term "creative class," of course, comes from Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, which argues not only that young, creative people have contributed to massive societal shifts in recent years, but also that cities that can attract those people will prosper. The book was a big hit in Cleveland, partly due to Forest City’s Albert Ratner playing Johnny Appleseed and distributing the book to community leaders.

The Free Times spoke with eight people who fit Florida’s description, asking what Cleveland offers them, and what it doesn’t. We found that the city itself – not the city government or its policies, but the physical remnants of a former Midwestern industrial powerhouse – is the attraction.

The factories, the warehouses and the rubble all serve as a kind of "unnatural natural resource," a man-made environment that has both inspired and enabled artistic expression with its grit, its waste and its vacancy. It’s not the kind of thing that can be legislated by a mayor or city council. And if they, the political powerbrokers, want the city to be more attractive to the "creative class," they need to understand that the people we talked to are accustomed to either helping each other, or doing it themselves, without "official" government help. Still, they wouldn’t turn down money.

MIKE KAPLAN
Trash and dirt fan his creative fire.

GLASS ARTIST MIKE KAPLAN recycles bits of the city habitually, routinely, to a degree that will see him well through the next Great Depression. His Glass Bubble Project studio off West 25th Street near the West Side Market is equipped with homemade tools of the trade, including the furnace and flaming glory hole. The furnace holds a molten pool of glass, and the glory hole re-heats it on the stick so the artist can work.

"Do I like Cleveland?" he asks, deflecting the question into the air as if to get a better look at it. "I might as well say, ëYeah.’ I’m not a sports fan. What’s fun about Cleveland besides sports?"

But he doesn’t take long to come at it from a different angle. "I think Cleveland’s coming up," he says. "I’m not sure it was ever down. I like a city when it’s a little dirtier because I find more trash. You’ve got to have a little bit of dirt. Everything we use is recycled trash."

Kaplan built his little boxes of Hell out of recycled fire bricks, held together and safety-gated with scrap metal – bed frames, auto parts, factory waste. Affordability is one reason he recycles, but he finds beauty in it, too – and sustenance. Overhead hangs a chandelier, its round skeleton comprising an iron wagon wheel rim and rings from stamping factory flashing. Within each ring is a brilliant glass pool seeming to drip gracefully from its center. The glass comes from recycled bottles. The whole thing hangs from heavy, rusted chain.

"You can find that stuff everywhere," Kaplan says.

During his years at Kent State University, where he settled on glass after dabbling in pre-med, he claims to have lived an entire summer on canned food and other staples found in empty housing after the other students left.

Kaplan opened the studio in 1998, after working in his father’s shop at Pearl Road Auto Wrecking and saving money. The low concrete block building was so affordable, he says, that he and a partner were able to buy it outright, without a loan. Nothing could be more attractive to an artist.

"OWNING THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION IS VITAL," says Matthew T. "Not to get all Marxist, but there is lots of affordable space, and people are happy to have their space used."

With his Los-Angeles based partner, Marcel DeJure, Matthew T. produces the 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Industry Film Festival and was part of the defunct underground concert collective Speak In Tongues. To pay bills, he works as an assistant director, location scout and crew manager for commercials. The first point he makes about Cleveland has to do with D.I.Y.-ability.

"We had no foundation money or sponsors [for 20,000 Leagues]," he says. "I don’t think big checks ever made it to small arts groups, so I don’t think they’ve suffered from corporate flight. We’ve been doing it out of our own pockets. And we haven’t lost money. D.I.Y. promotion works here. "

T. says that the first 20,000 Leagues festival, held at Speak in Tongues, attracted about 150 people to see 23 short films in a one-night event. After four years of growth, he estimates that the 2003 edition at the Beachland Ballroom brought up to 500 people to see 116 films in a weekend-long event, complete with parties and reviews.

Speak in Tongues thrived on the D.I.Y. energy of its collaborators, but was undeniably enabled by the fact that they had found a West Side, storefront social hall that might not have been occupied without them. And because of that fact, it was cheap.

What is commonly described as a burden for the city – underused storefronts, houses and industrial space-makes Cleveland look like the Promised Land to working artists. Almost none of them make the kind of income Richard Florida suggests by throwing them in the same class pool as architects, engineers and techies. So they go where space is cheap.

In Tremont, that fact led to one of the most often touted and easily understood benefits of attracting creative people to inner-city neighborhoods: the artist-driven real estate boom. And so having learned all the words to the old song about Tremont – and armed with Florida’s book – politicians and planners set about looking for ways to legislate economic engines and more neighborhood revivals.

Against that backdrop, the City Hall arts summit championed by Joe Cimperman and organized by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture shined an even brighter light on the arts’ role in the economy. Cleveland had already approved live/work zoning, which allows residents to pay residential utility rates in otherwise commercial or industrial areas. More recently, Councilman Matt Zone introduced legislation requiring certain construction projects to include money for arts components. Matthew T. says he supports live/workspace, even though it is often overpriced and, for artists, unaffordable.

SARAH MORRISON
"Artists go where there’s cheap rent."

DANCER AND CHOREOGRAPHER SARAH MORRISON grew up in Atlanta and moved to Cleveland to take advantage of a rare choreography scholarship at Case Western Reserve University. Because of an unusual dance program she found in high school, she grew up thinking it was normal for people to have access to studio space if they wanted to develop choreographic ideas. As an adult presenting her own work, she realizes how precious that is.

Morrison found Tremont after graduating from Case in 1996. She was looking for "really cheap dance/live space" when she stumbled upon the Union Gospel Press building. Using a borrowed phone book, she eventually tracked down the owner and struck a deal. She was able to pay some of her rent in trade, doing research on arts co-operatives for her landlord, and ended up living there for nine months. She danced in the chapel where the women workers of a Bible printing mission once said their prayers.

Morrison makes ends meet with a part-time job doing Alzheimer’s research at CWRU. She says the university is an "amazing" employer, offering some health and retirement benefits even to part-timers. The fact that Cleveland is affordable enough that she can support herself on a part-time job is one of the things that keeps her here. She says she might be able to support herself if she taught dance full time, but that would take too much energy away from creating and performing.

Morrison and her husband, artist Scott Radke, bought a house in Tremont, but she now keeps a studio on Lorain Avenue because it’s less expensive there.

"That’s where artists go," she says, "where there’s cheap rent. They don’t go for fancy talk about hip places. The zones they (developers) are creating are way too expensive for many artists to afford. That may be good for the city, but not for artists because we don’t develop a sustained area. Once the king and queen have entered, the pawns have to find the next field."

BRIAN BRETH
Convergence-Continuum director bought theater building.

AS THE OWNER OF THE BUILDING that houses his Convergence-Continuum Theater, executive director Brian Breth doesn’t live with the threat of rising rent. But he does have to deal with rising taxes. And there he finds inconsistency in the treatment artists receive by comparison to developers.

Convergence-Continuum is a 45-seat, black-box theater that immerses the audience in such avant-garde productions as Mac Wellman’s 7 Blow Jobs. When Breth and a partner bought their mixed-use building in Tremont, he says the Cuyahoga County valued it at $56,000. They paid about three times that, and the building was dilapidated.

As any homeowner in a similar situation would guess, the tax bill quickly caught up with the most recent sale price. But Breth wonders, why does a developer just a few blocks away on Tremont Ridge get tax abatement, which is passed along to new home buyers when an artist-entrepreneur – one of the people the city praises for the revitalization success that opened the door for the developers – does not?

Breth says the kind of change that would make life easier for artists is hard in a city with a manufacturing economy. He thinks Cleveland has seen a lot of talk on that front, but very little action.

"Manufacturing economies are old economies," Breth says. "They have lots of bureaucracy and are slow to change."

As an actor, he plans to leave Cleveland simply because there isn’t a big enough film industry here to support his aspirations for professional development. But he’s not leaving anytime soon – not before Convergence-Continuum is financially stable and can go on without him.

GALLERY OWNER JOAN PERCH opened her ArtMetro gallery in the Colonial Market Place on Euclid in spring of 2001. The economy was not great then, but the September 11 attacks soon made it much worse. Businesses closed and the already bleak retail district couldn’t attract new tenants.

"It was depressing to see the papered windows," she said.

But her ties to the arts community helped her create the ARTcade – simultaneously building traffic and offering one of the biggest cheap gallery space bonanzas in the city. Perch spoke with Landmark Management, Ltd., and persuaded the building’s owners to let working artists sign up for vacant storefronts at no cost. She found exhibitors who would keep the space busy with openings.

At that level, she says, it has worked. She has had daytime customers return for evening events, bringing friends. There’s been some turnover among the artists filling the gallery spaces, with new artists replacing others. Negotiations are underway to formalize an agreement with the Cleveland Institute of Art to show student work in one of the spaces. And paying tenants have begun to trickle in.

"It’s no longer a place where people are given space free," Perch says.

Perch says the city has been very helpful in streamlining the permit process for public events such as Sparx In The City. And she credits the Water Department, Mayor Jane Campbell and Councilman Joe Cimperman for helping to provide funding.

"Historically, Cleveland has done a bad job making a livable downtown mix," she says. "But the climate has changed considerably since the Arts Summit. There is much more openness. The push for public money has been very positive, but the results will only be seen down the road. It’s still an uphill battle."

Whether public funding will reach individual artists in the form of fellowships, or whether it will simply be directed toward institutions – therefore administrators and facilities instead of the people producing art – is the subject of current debate.

ARTIST ABE OLVIDO is one of the exhibiting artists at the ARTcade. He paints his scary architectural abstractions on big canvases and other surfaces in unused industrial space on East 45th Street. Born in the Philippines, he was two years old when he arrived in Seattle with his family. After graduating from the Columbus College of Art and Design, and a brief stop in Miami, he ended up in Cleveland.

Olvido and his Groop Collaborative partner, Mike Moritz, have participated in Sparx In The City events, Young Audiences benefits and urban design contests. Olvido appreciates the affordability of space in Cleveland, but he still has to work as night watchman at the Baricelli Inn to pay the bills. The Groop Collaborative, Ken Chapin’s Move Art Audience and other people in town who work together to make things happen, are another force keeping him in Cleveland. He says it’s a tough market, but then they’re all tough.

"Because we’ve pushed ourselves, we’ve gotten jobs," Olvido says. "But I have lots of friends who have left for lack of work. Do I think about leaving? All the time. And I have friends in all the good cities – places artists want to be. But they’re struggling too. Cleveland is affordable, but you’ve got to work it. If this is going to be your career, you can’t afford agents. You’ve got to work it."

RECORD PRODUCER BRANDON STEVENS, who runs Exit Stencil Records with his wife, Abbey, left Cleveland for Minneapolis in August. It wasn’t the Cleveland market or ambience that drove him out, but instead his quest for a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Still, he’s quick to praise Minneapolis: "It’s super bike-friendly. There’s a bike-only commuter highway on an old rail bed, there are bike-only lanes every couple of streets, and bike racks are common." Stevens also notes the high number of food co-ops and local theaters per capita.

And while it wasn’t the reason he left, Stevens acknowledges that Cleveland is a tough place for musicians to get their big break. And that’s part of the reason he started Exit Stencil: they saw good bands at the clubs – he mentions Coffinberry and the New Lou Reeds – but apart from the one-shot, self-promoting deals, there wasn’t a label in Cleveland trying to export them.

"There’s always been tons of good bands in Cleveland, but unfortunately they fade into obscurity because no one ever hears about them," says Stevens. "There’s lots of talent, apartments and practice spaces are cheap, and there are cool places for shows, but people get discouraged because it’s hard to get distribution outside of Cleveland."

He says cheap space and lots of fans at shows make it an easy place to become comfortable, but because of the allure of the big break, people always seem to be making plans to leave. Most of the artists who spoke with the Free Times for this story said, one way or another, that while Cleveland is a great place to make art, it’s a tough place to sell it.

Perch and glass artist Kaplan agree. "Prices people pay for art are much higher on the coasts or in Chicago than they are in Cleveland," Perch says. Kaplan says, "I might sell $3,000 in a year in Cleveland and $3,000 in a week, going to out-of-town shows. Cleveland is like the factory."

MELISSA SMITH
Her ëzine tells artists Don’t Blame Cleveland.

MELISSA SMITH, who works as a paralegal and publishes the monthly ‘zine, Don’t Blame Cleveland, says the city would gel into a better arts community – a better market, a more exciting scene, bigger national impact – if only people would break out of their circles.

"The point of the magazine is to stop the cliques," Smith says. "I know people in different circles – art, music, this law firm – but they don’t cross-pollinate. That’s the problem."

She produces Don’t Blame Cleveland without advertisers or sponsors. The ‘zine grew out of interviews she recorded at war protests. Friends encouraged her to transcribe them for distribution, and a magazine was born.

"A lot of people move away with the thought that Cleveland is the problem with their lack of success," she says. "They think it’s hard to get out of their own scene and into broader circulation. They think a bigger city would lead to more people."

But the bigger question for Cleveland and for those who are disciples of Richard Florida, is not whether Cleveland can attract creative people, but whether the city can retain them and offer a market for their wares.

"Cleveland is ready for an explosion," Smith says. "It’s becoming a place where new bands want to come and play. The Beachland, the Grog, there are lots of spaces, lots of galleries. But I don’t think the city – as far as the government or the Plain Dealer – we don’t see enough support for those people. I don’t see a lot of coverage of "underground" artists and musicians who are not at the big galleries and venues.

"That’s the reason I do Don’t Blame Cleveland."

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