DETROIT – A mural on the front wall of a onetime furniture showroom on Detroit’s west side features giant hands spelling the word “LOVE” in sign language.

The mood inside 4731 Grand River, though, has been downright glum of late after an ownership change prompted a mass eviction last month, emptying a building that served as an incubator for Detroit’s thriving arts scene since 2001. The building offered cheap studio space to 31 artists and served as headquarters for the Grand River Creative Corridor, which painted murals on 15 once-derelict buildings between Rosa Parks and Warren avenues.

“It was artists moving back to Detroit that started the renaissance, and now those are the people getting pushed out,” said Pat Domanski, a painter who was forced out of her studio on Grand River in May along with the others.

Arts advocates say that’s reality nowadays in Detroit: The city is hip in part because of its bohemian vibe, but as public art has helped boost property values artists are forced out through rising rents or building sales.

Just west of bustling downtown and Midtown, the Grand River neighborhood is still gritty but becoming a redevelopment hotspot, with a nearby housing village of Quonset huts and plans for chic restaurants. Owners of the arts incubator, who bought the building for $185,000 in 2000, sold it last year for $1 million, public records show.

The new owner is seemingly the unlikeliest of evictors: Allied Media Projects, a nonprofit in Detroit dedicated to social change and “media for liberation,” according to its website. It took out a $2 million mortgage and plans to update the building to serve as its headquarters, along with other progressive nonprofits.

The goal is to use the building to “remediate the impact of gentrification at a minimum and resist the structures that perpetuate gentrification,” said its executive director, Jenny Lee.

The irony of a group fighting gentrification by committing one of its most brutal acts – eviction – isn’t lost on Lee.

“It sucks that our vision has to come at the cost of artists who have used and loved that space,” Lee said. “There’s no way around it. It absolutely sucks.”

Related Detroit stories:

She said she’s had “sleepless nights” because of the evictions, but they were necessary because her nonprofit and others are also getting squeezed by rising rents in Detroit.

The evictions follow a host of other studio spaces for artists – including the Russell Street Industrial Center – that have closed, sold or displaced artists, said Sintex a well-known Detroit graffiti artist who used to live and work in the Grand River incubator.

“The growth of Detroit has forced artists to definitely hustle more. Instead of everyone being in the city, they are spread out more, to suburbs like Hazel Park,” said Sintex, who was born Brian Glass.

“The days of finding studios in old industrial spaces [in Detroit] are long gone.”