There’s always been little disagreement over the premise that a cluster of artists working together is more exciting to a city than a lone one.
That was long the idea behind the dozens in the ArtCraft Building, the seven-story warehouse nudged in between Superior Avenue and I-90. At least until late 2022, when the building’s landlord, TurnDev, decided to end month-to-month leases at the building, a September 2022 letter stated, “in order to facilitate restoration.” Artists be damned.
The exodus, which ended decades of the ArtCraft’s image as a beacon, led to worry: Where else might have decent sunlight? Can I even afford other studios? “Nowhere compares rent-wise,” painter Wally Kaplan told Scene at the time. “Nowhere.”
Well, maybe somewhere.
In the four years since the migration, and ArtCraft’s soon debut as the city’s new police headquarters, dozens of those exiled painters, illustrators, sculptors and photographers have mostly made their way to cozy studio space 20 blocks east, on the top two floors of the Twist Drill Building, deep in Cleveland’s Midtown at East 49th and Lakeside.
What started as relocation anxiety has evolved into, since the move, a blessing in disguise. ArtCraft’s faulty freight elevators aren’t a concern at the Twist Drill. (It has four.) Central air has replaced balmy summers and steam heat. That clutter of shared spaces is now private, white-walled studios with quiet views of Lake Erie.
“I have more freedom,” Kaplan said recently, standing in front of her easel on the fifth floor of the Twist Drill. Around her hang pastel portraits of friends, family, celebrities, strangers. “I can listen to the music I want to listen to.”
Kaplan smiled. “Which is laughable, yes,” she said. “But that really matters. It does.”
Space is an often-overlooked aspect of an artist’s life in relation to their work. Hemingway wrote his Nobel Prize-winning Old Man and the Sea at a standing desk in his Cuban bedroom. The philosopher Martin Heidegger preferred a timber cottage. Virginia Woolf famously demanded writers to find a room of one’s own.
And those spaces equally signify value to the city around them. With ArtCraft no longer art, the Twist Drill has solidified its presence among the Big Three artist buildings in the Cleveland area, including the Screw Factory in Lakewood and 78th Street Studios in Gordon Square.
What’s befallen the 20 or so ArtCraft émigrés working out of the Twist Drill is how to make great art while boosting their new building as a place to buy it.
Traditionally, open houses and gallery soirées have doubled as advertising nights to connect painters with those with deep enough pockets to buy their paintings. And not online. A 2025 survey of hundreds of makers in the UK found that nearly two-thirds of of their sales came from face-to-face purchases.
A reality probably most evident to Janet Luken, the nature painter that led a coalition of ArtCraft artists to the fifth floor of the Twist Drill, in 2022. Luken now spearheads the aptly titled Artists at the Twist, a group of painters, illustrators and designers that share studio costs and organize the building’s annual holiday show.
An event, just like Twist Drill’s summer open house, that acts as a skip-the-middleman approach, if you will, when artists sell directly to their patrons. Especially when, as Luken likes to remind people, “galleries often take half of your sales.”
“So, the studio really, for any artist, is a luxury item because it is an extra cost,” Luken said. While there exist public grants or commission work to go around in Cuyahoga County, “we don’t really have enough facilities to present our artwork in.”
“We’re really limited,” she said.
But can the Twist Drill really host its own Third Friday, the crown jewel of 78th Street? Though its fifth-floor studios are pristine, they’re tough to get to, requiring a maze-like trek up several staircases for unfamiliar newcomers. Way-finding is sparse. Even tenants in a second-floor event space didn’t know how to navigate to Kaplan and others’ studios.
Michael Fleming said he’s working on this. Fleming, who took over the Twist Drill in 2020, was open in 2022 to act as refuge for the ArtCraft tenants. Coffee roasters, dance companies, recording engineers already occupied space here, so why not 20 more artists?
Fleming said Twist is financially sound; all of its studio spaces, from small to large, are about occupied. He’d rather Twist naturally expand as a public-friendly artist’s hub than pretend Midtown’s industrial streets are naturally walkable. (They’re not.)
It’s partially why, last year, he bought the building across Lakeside and rehabbed it into the MultiCraft, which primarily houses an arts supply store. More studio space, he said, is coming soon.
“I don’t think we’re ready for a Third Friday-type of an event,” Fleming said in a phone call. “Right now, we’re in the hidden gem stage of our life, and I prefer to relish that as long as we can.”
Like Wally Kaplan and artist Alan Mintz. Both seemed content in their new studios during a recent tour, either due to newfound joy in privacy or creative whims that’ve come from that freedom.
And neither harbor any animosity for their former landlord or the city set to open its police headquarters in the space both of them worked out of for decades. A city spokesperson told Scene they even want to possibly hire them to decorate ArtCraft’s new phase with public art “as the building comes to fruition.”
Mintz seems to be over ArtCraft completely.
“I mean, you were dealing with lead paint. You were dealing with asbestos,” Mintz said, sitting in a swivel chair at his desk. “Dealing with the boiler, the electrical, the elevator, everything.”
“I think they had to strip it down to its bones to bring it up to a safe and usable standard again,” he said.
Kaplan shares the sentiment. Since moving in, she’s branched out in medium and subject. She’s grabbed big palette knives and bamboo brushes to paint everything from a lone girl at CMA to a rage-soaked portrait of Trump.
But Kaplan is here. She paints her grandchildren with verve and adoration. She looks out at the lake beyond her easel, feeling a certain kind of serenity the roar of a highway couldn’t instill in her.
Meaning she doesn’t plan to ever relocate again.
“Listen, it’s always possible, right? That they could” sell the building, she said. “But I really believe that that’s not in the cards.”
“I’m happy here,” she said. “I think most of us are.”
Correction, October 27, 2026 4:06 pm: The Multicraft Building was not abandoned before Michael Fleming took it over.
