BAYarts Executive Director Nancy Walters Heaton will step down after twenty years, and it’s not exaggerating to say she and a team of women who were not soccer moms saved the organization.

BAYarts Board President Mary Conway Sullivan says she and Executive Director Nancy Heaton met before either of them was actively involved at the gallery and community art center. “We originally met through our common daycare, where we were taking our kids, in Lakewood. We just started hanging out together.” Their kids had also taken classes at the organization, which at the time was known as BayCrafters. Heaton was taking a painting class there with her daughter, who was then eleven years old. It was 2004. At that time BayCrafters was not known much beyond the Bay Village city limits, and not much connected to the Cleveland art scene.

In fact, BAYarts’ now-familiar gallery—which these days routinely exhibits artists from all over Northeast Ohio—didn’t yet exist. The building was there: The Fuller House—the Queen Anne-style, Victorian home where Sam Shephard was arrested when it was still located a couple of miles east on Lake Road—had been moved along the lake on a barge and positioned in its current site in 1984. The organization’s director at the time, the late Sally Price, led that charge and led BayCrafters for several decades. But ever since, Fuller House had been unused and unattended, except as storage for art supplies and items associated with the BayCrafters annual Renaissance Fayre.

But while taking that painting class with her daughter, Heaton began to get involved as a volunteer. She had degrees in marketing and art from Kent State University; and by that time, she had lived in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC and England; and had been involved in art organizations in those places. She saw potential. “I was a mom, but not a soccer mom,” Heaton says. She recruited Mary Conway Sullivan and other women.

As Sullivan says, “Nancy took me through Fuller House, and as we looked, she said ‘this could be a gallery, and this could be classrooms.’” And with Heaton at the center of that crew of non-soccer moms, what Sullivan jokingly calls “the Revolution” was born.

In addition to the Fuller House, the potential included its bucolic setting in the Huntington Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks system, directly across the road from Huntington Beach.

Two decades later, after twenty years of involvement and sixteen years as executive director, Nancy Heaton plans to leave that role at the end of the year, after leading BAYarts through a rebirth involving a new name, a new board of directors, three major capital projects, and a full embrace of Northeast Ohio’s diverse art scene.

DRAWING PEOPLE IN

“Nancy is a very persuasive person,” Sullivan says. Back in those early days, “she was telling me about how BAYcrafters was on hard times. She recruited me and several others to save what the organization could be. She is a great connector of people, a great recruiter.”

In the atmosphere Heaton created, word began to spread that there was something happening at BAYcrafters. “I had no idea there was this other population out here of moms that were creatives,” Sullivan recalls. “And Nancy was right at the helm. She’s not a leader who said but didn’t do. She was right in there. She is indefatigable.”

In the beginning, that meant literally rolling up sleeves and cleaning. Racoons had moved into the Fuller House. But it also meant reinventing the organizational infrastructure. BayCrafters’ board was inactive. Its nonprofit status had lapsed. Asked in an email if there was a written version of a budget at that time, Heaton replied, “Hahahaha.” Sullivan estimates the whole organization’s budget might have amounted to $250,000.

But in those early years, Heaton made sure the volunteers would get involved not only in the nitty-gritty of BAYarts’ clean-up and art classes, but also in networking and in the campaign to establish Cuyahoga Arts and Culture—the public funding organization that administers the cigarette tax. That helped them connect with other organizations around the region. In order to qualify for support from the tax, organizations are required to have at least one paid employee. It was at that point—in 2008, after volunteering for four years—that Heaton officially became executive director, earning minimum wage. By then the organization had rebranded as BAYarts, and paid off about $40,000 in debt. Then things began to happen faster—or at least more visibly.

For most executive directors, leading an organization through one capital project is a capstone achievement. In her tenure at BAYarts, Heaton would eventually lead the organization through three. The first was for the renovation of the Fuller House, at a cost of $375,000. Key support came in 2008, with a grant from the Ohio Cultural Facilities Commission, with advocacy by then-Mayor Debbie Sutherland. With support from the Cleveland Metroparks and a capital campaign, they began renovations in 2009, and the renovated building reopened in January, 2011. Nine months later, Fuller House was the site of one of CAN Journal’s first and formative meetings: Leadership of 28 organizations gathered there, literally drawing names out of a hat to decide who would write about whom. Throughout her tenure, Heaton was eager to engage with people and organizations. She joined CAN’s Board of Directors, and her eagerness to pitch-in caused BAYarts to be one of just two venues that have repeated as hosts of CAN launch parties.

COLLABORATIVE STYLE

Networking became a hallmark of her style. Heaton has been a key organizer of Art Girls gatherings—networking events, usually happy hour gatherings, for women in the arts. They became a who’s who of Northeast Ohio arts leadership, which happens to be mostly women. And true to power-sharing form, hosting and organizing rotates on an ad-hoc basis.

A big part of Heaton’s success story is the story of other people’s successes. As Sullivan says, “She sees someone who would be good at something and inspires them, tees them up and gives them enough free reign to make it their own.”

Volunteer-turned-staffer-turned-board member Andrea Richards agrees. “Nancy has a great way of allowing people to be creative. She encourages people to go for it, go for ideas. She’s not a micromanager. Karen Petkovic is an example. When Artistic Director Eileen Stockdale left, she was more of an educator where Karen is someone who will go out and see new art and try to bring it in.”

Petkovic became artistic director in 2012, and under her leadership, Sullivan Gallery has presented exhibits by some of the region’s best-known artists, including Douglas Max Utter and Bay Village resident Liz Maugans. She estimates that the Sullivan Gallery (in some years complemented by the Huntington House Gallery) has presented about 170 shows since it opened. Important women artists who exhibited there include Martha Cliffel, Phyllis Fannin, Patty Flauto, Sharon Tousey, Jessica Pinsky, and Rebecca Cross. She makes special note of a site-specific sculptural installation by Jen Omaitz, extending from an architectural opening in the ceiling of the gallery, and also Max Markwald’s Skin (2018), which dealt with transgender issues, as well as Davon Brantley’s We Not Linkin’ (2021), which brought dialog about race relations to the far-west, suburban enclave. By trusting Petkovic to run the gallery that way, the organization Heaton was leading became an important part of Cleveland’s exhibition schedule.

Bay Village Mayor Paul Koomar also makes note of Heaton’s collaborative management style. When he spoke to CAN, he had just been to a Sunday night concert. “I was there for dinner at Chatty’s, and then we went over to the summer concert series on the lawn. They bring people in with those events, and that brings new people into BAYarts who get interested in other programming there. Nancy is very collaborative in her management style. She has a network that has brought in a great board and a lot of volunteers. She never lost the core mission of BAYarts in the classes. They have always looked for what else they could offer the community.”

Board-led fundraising has been another hallmark of Heaton’s success. BAYarts’ location in a western suburb means the organization doesn’t get much support from the major, Cleveland-centric foundations. A significant part of its revenue is earned income from classes, rentals, the consignment shop, and the market. Another key part is the board, and specifically its Moondance benefit—a campus-wide party with a guest of honor and lots of food and drink. Andrea Richards has co-chaired Moondance with Mary Sullivan for seven years. “In 2018 or 2019, it drew about 500 people,” she says. “At its pinnacle, it raised about $80,000. Then in 2020, along came Covid.”

During the pandemic, Heaton supported Education Director Linda Goik’s strategy to retool art classes into take-away activity packets, providing service to parents with kids at home, while sustaining one of the organization’s key revenue streams.

Meanwhile, Richards, Sullivan and company retooled Moondance into a take-away benefit: a package featuring wine, charcuterie, a take-home art activity, and a Spotify playlist that people could order online and pick-up in a drive-through line. It was a brilliant solution, but one that worked well once. Moondance has since returned to an in-person format, and is once again expecting to reach pre-pandemic levels of attendance and income. As Richards said in a July interview, “right now I have $48,000 in sponsors and haven’t sold any tickets yet.” Heaton will be Moondance 2024’s guest of honor.

After the Fuller House, Heaton’s next capital project was construction of a ceramics studio, with a budget of $500,000. The Karen Ryel Center for Ceramics Art and Education, a 2,500-square-foot facility that is home to ten pottery wheels and four kilns, plus workspace, is named in memory of ceramic artist Karen Ryel, who was a part of BAYarts’ close-knit ceramics community. The results are manifest in an annual ceramics exhibition and sale in the Sullivan Gallery, one of the biggest events there each year.

The most recent capital project was the two-stage renovation of what’s currently known somewhat generically as “the Playhouse.” It’s the former Huntington Playhouse, which had been home to a community theatre of the same name, producing its last show in 2015. With a budget of $1.3 million, and the guidance of architect John C. Williams (who also designed the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station, and the adaptive reuse of a Cleveland Trust bank into the downtown Heinen’s grocery store, rotunda and all), Heaton led the organization through renovation to make the former theater adaptable and useful for a variety of activities, from concerts to parties: They removed tiered seating, replaced it with a flat concrete floor, and renovated the whole interior, leaving the proscenium, stage house and back stage storage in place. Naming rights are available.

With the Playhouse and the whole campus of facilities in place, what was once a sleepy organization now hums with activity, and potential for more. In addition to a robust class schedule and a gallery that opens new exhibits the second Friday of every month, the campus is home to a weekly concert series, and a June through September Thursday afternoon market. Even on the verge of retirement, Heaton talks about programs she hopes become reality. The Playhouse—with its stage and flexible seating—holds possibilities for more concerts, perhaps movies, perhaps a speaker series, and other programs yet to be defined.

Also yet to be defined is what Nancy Heaton does in retirement. In 2021, before retirement was a plan, she bought a house and moved to North Collinwood, where she’s surrounded by artists and the Waterloo Arts District. One of her daughters says she’s not “retiring.” She’s “re-branding.”

“I can’t see myself not being engaged in the arts,” Heaton says. “But I’d like to take a sabbatical first.”