Grafton Nunes arrived in Cleveland in 2010 to find the Cleveland Institute of Art on a financially "unsustainable" course. As he leaves, the four-year art college is in solid shape and ready to forge ahead under incoming President Kathryn Heidemann.Michael C. Butz, Cleveland Institute of Art

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Institute of Art was in rough shape 12 years ago when Grafton Nunes interviewed for the job of becoming its next president.

CIA, as it is known, had been in operation since 1882 as Northeast Ohio’s premier college of art and design, attracting faculty and turning out graduates who had contributed immensely to culture and industry throughout the region and across the U.S.

But when Nunes came to town as a job candidate, the college was “really on the verge of collapse,’’ he reminisced over coffee at his home in Willoughby Hills recently on the eve of his retirement, which starts Friday.

Twelve years ago, a minority of trustees were fuming over changes in architectural plans approved by the majority for a renovation and expansion of CIA’s Joseph McCullough Building on Euclid Avenue at East 116th Street, a former Ford Model T factory-turned studio complex. Some had quit the board in protest.

Cleveland Institute of Art trustees concluded by 2010 that they couldn't build a proposed expansion of their McCullough Center designed by M.V.R.D.V. of the Netherlands that had been nicknamed "the Inchworm" after the shape of its big central arch.Courtesy M.V.R.D.V and Cleveland Institute of Art

In order to pay its bills, CIA was drawing $2 million or 15% of its endowment every year, Nunes said. It was far more than the 5% draw nonprofits try not to exceed, and Nunes said it was an “unsustainable’' course.

Meanwhile, the staff was top-heavy with administrators. Faculty members were flaming each other over academic conflicts through emails that they copied or blind-copied to scores of colleagues.

Nunes described the atmosphere as “a rolling thunder’' of “anxiety, dissatisfaction, and anger. One person’s anxiety or one person’s conflict became everybody’s conflict.”

Now, as Nunes prepares to retire, observers say he’s leaving CIA in vastly better condition than when he arrived.

The college is operating in the black and ready to continue playing a critically important role in the cultural and educational life of Northeast Ohio under incoming President Kathryn Heidemann.

Grafton Nunes spoke at the Cleveland Institute of Art before the coronavirus pandemic interrupted in-person instruction in the spring of 2020.Courtesy Cleveland Institute of Art

“It’s a stable, strong part of Cleveland,’’ said Chris Ronayne, former president of University Circle Inc., the nonprofit development corporation serving the city’s cultural, medical, and educational neighborhood, and the Democratic candidate for county executive in the November election.

Nunes “truly, truly brought CIA to a new level,’’ Ronayne said.

Philanthropist and arts entrepreneur Fred Bidwell, the founding CEO of the summerlong FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, which kicks off for its second round of region-wide art exhibitions on July 14, called Nunes “a great leader for CIA, and an incredibly good team player for the community.”

Such sentiments are backed up by the numbers Nunes racked up during his years at CIA.

On his watch, the Cleveland Institute of Art:

- Completed a six-year, fully-funded, $75 million expansion, renovation, and consolidation of its campus on Euclid Avenue at East 116th Street as part of the Uptown development in University Circle.

- Reduced the annual endowment draw from the CIA-managed portion of its $31 million endowment to $922,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30.

- Diversified the college’s student body from 18% classified as minority in 2010 to 31% in 2021.

- Earned academic distinctions including a No. 2 global ranking in animation behind the School of Visual Arts in New York, according to a jury of more than 150 professional animators.

- Provided $13.2 million in scholarships in 2021, with grants ranging from $8,500 per student to a full ride during a year in which tuition and fees were $42,530.

- Steered the college through the coronavirus pandemic without a steep drop in enrollment.

Nunes, 72, a native of Chelsea, Mass., who grew up largely in Portland, Maine, considers his time in Cleveland the culmination of a career that included work as a filmmaker and producer in the 1970s and ‘80s, plus teaching and administrative posts at Columbia University and later at Emerson College in Boston.

Surrounded at home by artworks by CIA faculty luminaries including ceramist Bill Brouillard, Op artists Julian Stanczak and Ed Mieczkowski, and graduate Dana Schutz, a painter, Nunes said he viewed his professional development as a process of “naïve improvisation.’’

Grafton Nunes, outgoing president of the Cleveland Institute of Art, views an Op Art painting in the college's collection by former faculty member Richard Anuskiewicz.Steven Litt, cleveland.com

At Columbia, Nunes helped rebuild the School of the Arts after the university had allowed it to atrophy. Also relevant to CIA, where Nunes took over an expansion and renovation project, were the dozen years he spent at Emerson, serving as the founding dean of that college’s School of the Arts.

In Boston, Nunes helped organize Emerson’s move from a collection of brownstones in Back Bay to office buildings and theaters south of Boston Common. The relocation transformed what had been the city’s “Combat Zone’' by draining the area’s sex industry of its clientele.

“When there were few people on the street, you’d see the guys sneaking into the porno theaters,’’ Nunes said. “But if there were students around, they’d walk on by. They didn’t want to be seen going into the porno shops and strip joints. They [the businesses] went bankrupt and closed. We acquired some of them and renovated them and used the spaces. It re-energized the theater district.’’

Emerson College eventually acquired three historic theaters, giving Nunes hands-on experience in historic preservation and project management.

In Cleveland, there were no porno houses to chase away, but an art college with a stalled expansion project that needed a fresh start and a faculty culture that, according to Nunes, had turned “poisonous.”

Before Nunes arrived, CIA had decided to close its longtime main building on East Boulevard at Bellflower Road, opposite the Cleveland Museum of Art, and to consolidate operations along Euclid Avenue in the budding Uptown District, part of University Circle.

The Cleveland Institute of Art, located in the University Circle Uptown district in Cleveland, has been ranked No. 2 in the world for instruction in 2D animation.Steven Litt, Cleveland.com

Under its former president, David Deming, CIA had renovated the McCullough Center, designed by the famous early 20th-century architect from Detroit, Albert Kahn.

When Nunes came in 2010, CIA was in the midst of planning an expansion at McCullough but cost estimates had come in too high on an architecturally flamboyant addition designed by Dutch architect Winy Maas, a principal of the firm of MVRDV, based in Rotterdam.

Designed like a giant bridge resting on the ground with a large hump in the middle and an arched entry underneath, the project had earned the nickname, the “inchworm.’’

Trustees opted to pursue a smaller, cheaper design provided by the Cleveland firm of Burt/Hill, now Stantec, which had partnered with Maas and MVRDV on proposals including the “inchworm.’’

Cleveland Institute of Art trustees concluded by 2010 that they couldn't build a proposed expansion of their McCullough Center designed by M.V.R.D.V. of the Netherlands that had been nicknamed "the Inchworm" after the shape of its big central arch.Courtesy Cleveland Institute of Art, Winy Maas Partners M.V.R.D.V

Yet, as Nunes said he discovered, the trustees had already spent $30 million renovating the McCullough building and had only $14 million remaining to complete the expansion.

Even more troubling was that the plan then under consideration by trustees would have accommodated a maximum of only 480 students — some 40 to 70 less than the college needed for optimal financial and educational performance, Nunes said.

Nunes realized after surveying faculty about the school’s needs for instructional space and services that it really needed a bigger and more expensive addition that would ultimately take the entire cost of the expansion and renovation project to $75 million, far more than a consultant had told college trustees they could predictably raise.

But Nunes convinced the board to change course and then found donors willing to bankroll a revised Stantec design that added the 80,000-square-foot George Gund Building to the west side of the McCullough building.

Key to his success, he said, was his ability to persuade Peter B. Lewis, then the chairman of Progressive Corp. to make a significant gift. Lewis was then in the midst of boycotting Cleveland charities to express his anger over how Case Western Reserve University had — according to him —mishandled the project to build a new home for the Weatherhead School of Management, designed by Frank Gehry and largely bankrolled by Lewis.

Nunes convinced Lewis to donate $5 million to the CIA project in 2012, ending the philanthropist’s boycott. Nunes also convinced Lewis’s ex-wife, arts supporter Toby Devan Lewis, to donate an additional $2.5 million.

Another $9.2 million came in 2013 from CIA’s sale of its 4.2-acre property at East Boulevard to CWRU and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Additional philanthropic donations and $18.3 million in tax credits rounded out financing for the project.

An aerial photo provided by the Cleveland Institute of Art depicts University Circle's bleak Uptown District before construction of new apartments and retail, an expansion of the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.Cleveland Institute of Art

The expansion included a new art gallery and a new home for the Cleveland Cinematheque, the school’s repertory film theater, and assembly hall, which is named for Peter B. Lewis.

Nunes is most enthused about the four-story, sky-lighted atrium that slices between the McCullough Building and the George Gund addition, creating a multi-level town square for the school. Walls are surfaced either with drywall, making it easy to hang art, or with plywood, giving the interior a rough-and-ready informality.

Nunes also helped change the character of CIA by providing new dorms for freshmen in University Circle’s Uptown development in 2014 and for sophomores in the Euclid 117 Building, built on CIA property in 2018.

Located close to the consolidated CIA complex, the housing enables students to come and go safely after working late in studio spaces at the school, Nunes said.

Dressed in the academic robe he earned at Columbia University, Grafton Nunes marched in the Friday, Aug. 28, 2015 parade from the old Cleveland Institute of Art facility at 11141 East Blvd., Cleveland, to its newly expanded and unified campus at 11610 Euclid Ave. in the Uptown development in University Circle.The Plain Dealer

While changing CIA’s physical footprint, Nunes reoriented its fractious faculty culture by requiring instructors to meet face-to-face when debating academic issues and to use email only to memorialize agreements, not to inflame conflicts.

He also cajoled the faculty to share common resources, such as the fabrication shop in the McCullough Building. And he helped the school work through a redesign of its curriculum that eliminated the use of the word “environment” as a pretentious and confusing way of saying “department.”

Heidemann, Nunes’s successor, said she had zero interest in leaving a prestigious administrative post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when a headhunter contacted her about becoming CIA’s dean of faculty and vice president of academic affairs, a job she accepted in 2019.

The board of directors of the Cleveland Institute of Art announced Wednesday that Kathryn Heidemann, the vice president of academic affairs and dean of faculty, has been appointed to succeed Grafton Nunes as the college's president in 2022.Cleveland Institute of Art

She took the job, she said, Wednesday, in large part because after meeting Nunes, she decided to accept his offer of mentorship. She said she also understood, although it was never stated baldly in her recruitment, that she had a shot at following in Nunes’s footsteps.

“At the end of the day, it was, ‘do I want to work for this guy or not?’ ‘’ she said. “He was really a very, very key reason’' to accept the job offer.

Heidemann said her objectives as CIA’s incoming president include having the school act as “a creative disrupter’' among industries in Cleveland, and “inserting ourselves in the civic conversation about how we reimagine the city of Cleveland.’’

The Cleveland Institute of Art will remain a place rooted in the fundamentals of its first-year Foundation program, which instills in students a core understanding of drawing as the root of all creative visual expression.

But while the college continues emphasizing traditional media such as painting and drawing, Heidemann said it will also explore “how interactive technology and immersive reality are changing the whole creative canvas of art and design.”

As for Nunes, he said he’ll start his retirement with projects related to reading and writing while serving on several nonprofit boards in Cleveland. And he’ll devote more time to his undying passion for film.

As he put it, his next phase will be a process of “naïve improvisation.”

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