Four New Sculptures Bring Color to Cleveland's Buckeye Corridor, $48K Well Spent

Four new public art sculptures are transforming a stretch of Cleveland's Buckeye neighborhood, standing between Woodhill Road and S. Moreland Boulevard as a more than $48,000 investment in a corridor long overdue for a visual lift. The pieces, created by artist James Simon, include a kid holding a boombox, a boxer, an astronomer and a garden lady, each designed with one three-dimensional side and one flat side.

The installation marks Simon's second contribution to the Buckeye corridor, according to News 5 Cleveland, following his 2008 creation of the Buckeye Trumpet Man and Dog, also known as The Jazz Man, a 16-foot concrete sculpture installed in the Art and Soul of Buckeye Community Park near Buckeye Road and East 118th Street, per Ohio Outdoor Sculpture. That earlier piece was created in partnership with the Buckeye Development Corp and Cleveland Public Art.

City of Cleveland Public Art Coordinator Tarra Petras described the new sculptures as a more than $48,000 investment and said the location provides an entryway into a vibrant urban neighborhood. She also said art has a healing and therapeutic component, according to the same News 5 Cleveland report.

A Neighborhood That Has Seen Its Share of Change

Buckeye was once known as Little Hungary, home to a Hungarian population that exceeded 35,000 in the 1930s and was, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, considered the largest such community in the world outside of Budapest. Post-WWII suburbanization and redlining reshaped the area, and by 2020 U.S. Census data the neighborhood was 78.5% Black.

James Simon, who lives in Pittsburgh's Hill District, said bringing beautiful things to neighborhoods creates a better atmosphere for residents. He drew a comparison between Buckeye and his own neighborhood back home, noting that Pittsburgh's Hill District has experienced good times and hard times.

Resident Reaction on the Ground

Joshua Smart, who lives in Buckeye, said the artwork shows strength. He believes the statues symbolize positive change for the neighborhood, a sentiment that speaks to how residents are processing the sudden arrival of color along a corridor many pass through every day.

How Cleveland Pays for Public Art

The sculptures exist because of Cleveland's percent-for-art ordinance, established under the city charter in 2003, which requires municipal capital projects with construction budgets of $300,000 or more to set aside 1.5% of funding for public art, according to Signal Cleveland. The program is administered directly by the city under Petras since 2022, and it requires public community input for streetscape projects. Before that shift, management ran through LAND Studio, a civic organization formed through the merger of Cleveland Public Art and Park-Works that oversaw the city's public art program from 2003 until 2022.

Proposals for artwork visible from a public street must also pass through local design review committees and win final approval from the City Planning Commission or Landmarks Commission, per the same Signal Cleveland reporting. Ohio has a comparable state-level mechanism: the Ohio Percent for Art Program, enacted by the state legislature in 1990 and administered by the Ohio Arts Council, which requires 1% of appropriations for state-funded public building projects over $4 million to go toward commissioning or acquiring art. That state program has commissioned artwork for more than 100 public building projects since its inception.

An Artist Rooted in Craft and Community Revitalization

Before turning to large-scale urban sculpture, Simon spent 15 years as a professional luthier, completing an apprenticeship in Manchester and Oxford, England, in the early 1980s under master luthier Andrew Dipper to learn violin making and wood carving, according to Contemporary Craft. He has carried that woodcarving and mold-making background into his concrete public art practice.

Since 1998, Simon has used public art as a tool for organic, community-focused revitalization, transforming a former warehouse on Gist Street in Pittsburgh's Uptown into a studio and launching the Art on Gist Street project to turn a blighted block into an open-air gallery, per Ceramic Arts Network. His broader portfolio includes the 15-foot concrete Liberty Avenue Musicians, installed in 1999 in Pittsburgh's Cultural District as an homage to the city's jazz legacy, and multi-figure gateway sculptures at Perry Harvey Sr. Park in Tampa, Florida.

What the Investment Means for Buckeye

The Buckeye sculptures land amid broader conversation about the economic weight of arts spending in the region. Cuyahoga County's nonprofit arts and culture sector generated $533.2 million in direct economic activity in 2022 and supported 8,637 local jobs, according to an earlier Hoodline report on the region's arts funding windfall. Whether a few sculptures can meaningfully shift the fortunes of a commercial corridor still recovering from decades of disinvestment remains an open question, but for a resident like Smart, the new figures along Woodhill Road and S. Moreland Boulevard already read as a sign of momentum.