BRICK Ceramic + Design Studio Opens on Waterloo Road

Brick

Fri 5/1 @ 6-10PM

BRICK Ceramic + Design, which opens this weekend, has been a long time in the making.

It’s part of the next wave of businesses that will brand North Collinwood’s Waterloo Road as a hub for hands-on creative art making. The brainchild of first-time entrepreneur Valerie Grossman, who graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2012, Brick will offer artist studio and storage space on a membership basis, a gallery, and, for those who always wanted to try their hands at ceramics, classes and workshops. Grossman cites Zygote Press, which does the same for printmaking, as her model.

Grossman and her crew have spent months restoring the space, a former auto garage built around 1930 with a house in the front built around 1910. The studio includes a large Cone 10 gas kiln, several electric kilns, and equipment such as pottery wheels, a spray booth, an extruder, a slab-roller, a mold-making area and a pug mill. Visitors can check it all out at the grand opening Fri 5/1 from 6-10pm where Twizz and Rene Schiffer of Apollo’s Fire will be providing music for a party during the monthly art walk, Walk All Over Waterloo.

How did someone still in her 20s, with no business background, happen to start such an ambitious undertaking?

“It really started with the search for affordable studio space after college,” she says. “When I graduated from CIA, I was fortunate to have a small space as part of someone else’s studio. I found it difficult to hold a full-time job as well as set up a studio. An unfinished space to start out a studio were expensive for a blank space and you’d still have to furnish it.”

Brick Storefront

With the local development corporation Northeast Shores landing big government funding for the transformative Waterloo streetscape, completed last fall, it had hatched a plan to fill surrounding buildings with arts-related businesses to attract artists to the area. It had acquired the buildings on the corner of E 161st and Waterloo and had put out a call for proposals.

“I really knew I wanted to do this but never knew I’d have the opportunity to do it so soon after school,” says Grossman. “I found through Alenka Banco [formerly with Northeast Shores; now director of the Cleveland Arts Prize] that she was looking for an artist to take over the space. Alenka helped mentor me through the process once Northeast Shores accepted the proposal. It’s based on the Zygote model. She’s hooked me up with Liz Maugans [one of Zygote’s founders].”

Initially Grossman was going to buy the buildings, which turned out to be a little ambitious for a neophyte businesswoman. So Northeast Shores is her landlord, although she has an option to buy them in the future if all goes well.

“They really made things happen for me,” she says. “I could have found the way to do the build-out but not as beautifully and thoroughly as Northeast Shores has been able to do. The build-out required a lot of little things that caused a lot of expense. Because it’s so old, nothing was even in the space. The windows had to be ground down on the side to fit into an uneven space. And there was the process of getting permits through the city — this space was zoned as industrial rather than commercial because of the gas kiln. That’s been an adventure. Fortunately Northeast Shores has dealt with city a bunch.”

KIln

Grossman, a Euclid native who loves hanging out at the Beachland Ballroom up the street and nearby Euclid Beach Lakefront Park, is excited to be part of the growing Waterloo community, and says she’s found people friendly and helpful.

“There’s a great wave of momentum,” she says. “We go to the merchant meetings and we’re all fired up. I’ve met so many of my immediate neighbors who have reached out and become friends, offered their help. I think push for new artist district is really exciting. It’s an amazing opportunity to be part of something like that.”

She’s even connected to the building’s history. The great grandson of the original owner contacted her through Facebook.

“It was such a magical moment when he first got to visit building,” says Grossman “It had been abandoned so long and he had heard so many stories from his father and grandfather and he finally got to see the inside of the building. We’re going to have a photo show of his family photos of the building.”

Valerie

Grossman and her team (which includes her mother) have been working day and night to get ready to open. But she’s already thinking down the road with a vision of what Brick could become in the future.

“Five years from now I’d like BRICK to be functioning where artists can come in and out; artists will have 24-hour access,” she says. “I’ll be teaching the classes initially but eventually I’d like to get some other teachers teaching.”

She’s even dreaming beyond that, of some day becoming a small–scale manufacturing facility to bring economic opportunities to the neighborhood.

“I’d like to do more design work through Brick and take commissions,” she says. “I’d like to be producing work locally and providing more job opportunities, not just like a studio manager. Through BRICK’s early years I think I’ll only be able to hire four people but I’d like to create more job opportunities and bring manufacturing back to city. Eventually I feel like we might need to expand for commercial work. So many warehouses in Collinwood are available. I’ve been looking around to see.”

For information about membership and classes, go to brickceramics.com. The  opening is free and open to all.

BRICK’s Kickstarter campaign runs through May 6. Go here to learn about that.

Cleveland, OH 44110

 

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