Under Mr. Cloyd’s guidance, the block bordered by Warren Avenue and Berkeley, Clarendon, and Tremont streets became the Boston Center for the Arts, and he was its first executive director.

A 1976 report by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Educational Facilities Laboratories called it “one of the most extensive and astonishing uses of found space for the arts in this country.’’

Mr. Cloyd also had served as chairman of the South End’s urban redevelopment commission. By creating the Boston Center for the Arts, he saved some buildings from destruction.

The center’s eight buildings are now home to the Boston Ballet, theaters, rehearsal studios of various sizes, and artists’ studios.

“In talking with artists I found that what they need is space for rehearsal, practicing, building sets, the behind-the-scenes things,’’ he told the Globe in 1981. “Opening night is really the easiest part.’’

Born in Watseka, Ill., Mr. Cloyd grew up in Hillsboro, Ill.

Mr. Cloyd, whose father was a minister, enlisted in the Army after high school and served during World War II. Afterward, he attended the University of Illinois, where he met Nancy Jean Evans. They married in 1948.

Mr. Cloyd graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in education and took a civilian job as education director at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois.

By the 1960s he and his family were in Boston, where he worked in an administrative role for the Unitarian Church during the era when the Unitarian and Universalist churches consolidated to become the Unitarian Universalist Association.

While living in the South End, Mr. Cloyd befriended immigrant artists, including famed Hungarian pianist Tibor Szász.

In e-mails, Szász called Mr. Cloyd “one of my closest friends’’ and said he lived with the Cloyds while studying piano at New England Conservatory.