Community Survey       Artist Survey

Heights Arts has been working to connect our community with the many local literary, visual, craft and musical artists who make Northeast Ohio rich with creative energy. Now, as we begin year 20, we are looking ahead to the next twenty. Over the last year, as Heights Arts and the rest of the world waited for a return to “normal”, the advisory board assembled a group of stakeholders consisting of board members and respected community members to create a Reimagination Task Force. The task force recently engaged a consultant to assist with the process of reaching out to the organization’s supporters and community members to help determine the direction of future programming.    

Heights Arts’ first project, the Coventry Peace Arch, still stands today in Coventry P.E.A.C.E park. Visitors to Cleveland Heights can enjoy other various public art around the city, including the Coventry benches and fences, the mural on the back of the Cedar Lee Theater, and the mosaic installed in collaboration with the former Heights Youth Club (now Christ Community Church) on Washington and Lee. The latest public art installation is a multi-disciplinary project in collaboration with Heights High students, Heights Arts Haiku Death Match poets, and Heights Libraries. Through this project, students responded with visual art to original haiku. The project is installed outside the Lee Road and Coventry libraries in the form of poetry squares.  

Today we continue that initiative through our store featuring local art and crafts, providing four group and four individual exhibitions, and presenting many community concerts and poetry events at our space and in the community through Random Acts of Art and Ekphrastacy poet and artist talk series. While the programming is robust and varied, executive director Rachel Bernstein is looking forward to hearing from the residents and artists to make sure the organization is meeting the needs of its community.

Says Bernstein, ”We are very excited to begin this reimagination process. While we were disappointed to suspend our regular programming during the pandemic, it allowed us to take time we might not have had to think about how we can find ways engage as many people as possible through our programming, and we are looking forward to hearing from a diverse population of not only our steadfast supporters, but those who don’t know us and have never experienced our programming. This will help us identify barriers that might have kept people from engaging with us in the past and will help us shape our programming to include them in our future. “

The “Barriers to Art” surveys will consist of both a community member and artist survey. The surveys will be open to residents and artists throughout the Cleveland area, through mid-August, and are designed to get a broad response from several communities throughout the Cleveland area. Once the results are compiled, we will then begin work to determine next steps throughout its 2021-2022 fiscal year.