Cleveland Arts Prize winner Greg Peckham will emphasize art while leading  Conservancy for CVNP

In recognition of his several decades of promoting access to public art in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, Greg Peckham was selected by the Cleveland Arts Prize to receive this year’s Robert P. Bergman Prize.

“Greg exemplifies the values celebrated by the Bergman Prize,” says artist, friend and mentee, Mark Reigelman II (CAP 2018). “His thoughtful leadership, generosity of spirit, and steadfast belief in the power of art to transform place and build community make him not just deserving of this honor, but emblematic of it.”

In June, Peckham was named President and CEO of Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Previously, he served as Executive Director at Cleveland Public Art from 2004 to 2011. From 2011 to 2016, he served as LAND Studio’s Managing Director, then took on the role of Executive Director from 2017 to 2025. He says he considers himself more planner than artist, so his interests include urban policy focused on arts and culture, infrastructure, transportation, and community development. 

While helming LAND Studio, Peckham was directly involved in the envisioning and implementing of numerous high-profile projects, including reimagining Public Square, revamping Perk Park on East 12th Street, designing the Nord Family Greenway in University Circle, and a series of large-scale murals and installations for Cleveland’s rapid transit Inter/Urban railway.

“My personal and professional approach has always centered on ensuring that all people have access to the positive impacts of parks and green space and nature whether they live in the city or outside of it, and making sure that everybody has the opportunity to experience art as part of their daily life,” Peckham says. “Whether that’s in city neighborhoods or the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, I want to make sure that people get all of the good stuff that they get from having access to parks. Not every kid needs to come to CVNP, but every kid should at least have a park that’s safe, close and has positive things for them to do and experience.”

He says perhaps the most important of his past efforts is the development of Irishtown Bend Park. The multiphase Port of Cleveland project requires stabilization of the historic site’s steep hillside in the Flats later this year. Once completed, the Cleveland MetroParks will begin construction of a 25-acre waterfront park that is expected to open in 2027. The Port of Cleveland’s goals are to enhance public access to the Cuyahoga River while maintaining the crucial shipping channel along the city’s “crooked river.”

Peckham says the project represents the culmination of bringing together the arts community and community engagement in a way that elevates the standard of design in Cleveland and ensuring that it was a people-centered design.

“That project will be completed long after I’ve left the firm,” Peckham relates. “But the process to bring together the design of that future park and the community’s vision and voice for it is a project that is most meaningful to me and spanned the entire time that I worked with LAND Studio.”

An inveterate hiker since he grew up in Cleveland Heights, Peckham’s new job at CVNP enables him to enjoy daily access to the more than 33,000 acres of diverse ecosystems, including forests, rivers, historic farmlands and wetlands, located between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. He also gets to combine his two loves, nature and the arts.

“The desire of the board and the organization to go even deeper into the commitment of involving the arts and artists in the park was a huge part of the attraction for me to get involved with the Conservancy,” Peckham says.

CVNP has a longstanding tradition of involving artists in the advocacy for the park and to celebrate its magnificent natural attractions. For the past several years, the Conservancy has operated The Gallery in the Boston Mills area of the park. Currently, the gallery features and exhibit in conjunction with the Akron Art Museum of photographs by Robert Glenn Ketchum of the park from the 1980s to support advocacy for becoming a national park. The exhibit celebrates CVNP’s 50^th anniversary as a national recreation area that achieved national park status in 2000.

“The Gallery is in the DNA of this place and this organization,” Peckham said. “We established it a few years ago as a experimental place where the arts and artists can have a home and a place to present work that deals with the natural environment and all of the different themes that impact the Cuyahoga Valley.”

Peckham adds that the Conservancy also has a collaboration with the Museum of Creative Human Art (MCHA), a Cleveland-based African American arts and youth engagement organization that performs much of the curatorial work at The Gallery. From Happy Days Lodge to Blossom Music Center, CVNP is home to numerous concerts ranging from country and folk to rock and rap to classical music performed by The Cleveland Orchestra.

“This idea of the arts being even more woven into the programming and experience of people coming to the park is fundamental to what I’m hoping to accomplish there,” he says.

Peckham is also proud that school field trips and summer camp programs may be the earliest exposure to nature for many of the 10,000 students who visit the park annually. The Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center co-managed by the Conservancy and the National Park Service is one of only 16 educational facilities in U.S. national parks, many provided by independent vendors.

“Because our focus is not just on environmental education but on creativity and exploration, the arts are definitely a dimension of the programming that is woven into CVNP’s Environmental Education Center,” he explained.

He’s also proud that the park’s recent annual visitor numbers average between 2,5 to 2.9 million people, which made it the twelfth most visited park in the U.S. in 2023. With those figures, CVNP receives significantly more visitors each year than the Cleveland Museum of Art, West Side Market and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame combined. 

“The proximity to urban centers and accessibility of our cultural assets that surround this park is totally different and more beneficial than in almost any other national park in the country,” Peckham concludes. “That’s a building block that we can take advantage of, so part of the Conservancy’s job is to serve as a bridge to foster those partnerships.”