New York City Arts Leader Helen Lang Will Take Over Steel Yard
Monday, April 22, 2013
The Steel Yard, Rhode Island's nationally recognized industrial arts nonprofit, announces Helen Lang as its new Executive Director. Lang will guide the Yard as it enters its second decade of creative experimentation and community building in the industrial valley district of Providence’s West End.
“Helen is an accomplished professional and thrives at the crossroads of arts and community – we are fortunate to have her with us to guide the Steel Yard in the next stage of our growth,” said Peter Gill Case, president of the Board of Directors at the Steel Yard. “I hope the community at large will join us in welcoming Helen—we look forward to deepening our existing relationships as well as sparking new ones in the coming years.”
Helen Lang
Lang, a native of Panama and recent transplant from New York, comes to Providence with a rich background in non-profit arts management. She has held numerous high-profile positions in the New York arts community; Lang served as director of finance at the Tribeca Film Institute, as executive director of the Cummington Community for the Arts, and, most recently, as finance manager of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. She has also held key administrative positions at the Legal Aid Society, Children’s Rights, and the Astraea Foundation for Social Justice She holds an MBA from Columbia, an MFA from New York University and an A.B. from Vassar College.
“I’m ecstatic to have the opportunity to help forge (no pun intended) the Steel Yard’s ongoing contributions to the vibrant and creative life of Providence,” Lang said. “I look forward to working to promote the Yard’s unique industrial-arts and community based mission, and to continue to engage the broader population through expanded programming.”
Transition for the Steel Yard
Lang arrives at the Steel Yard at a significant. In 2013, the Yard will celebrate its 10th anniversary and embark on a strategic planning process that will propel its community education, business and workforce development, and Public Projects programs into the next decade. Lang stated that among her “key priorities will be to pay tribute to all of the Yard’s accomplishments in light of the organizations upcoming 10th anniversary; as well as setting a course for the future and thanking the community that has sustained us all these years.”
Lang succeeds long time Executive Director Drake Patten, who left the Steel Yard in March to start an urban farm supply business, cluck!.
Under Patten’s leadership, the Steel Yard recently completed a $1.2 million Brownfield cleanup that received numerous local and national design and preservation awards. The Yard’s two-acre site now includes over 9,000 square feet of workshop and studio space – including an iron foundry, a metalworking shop, ceramics, jewelry, and blacksmithing departments – as well as sweeping outdoor work and exhibition space.
The Yard serves over 300 people annually through community education classes, introduces dozens of teens to metal fabrication through special youth programming such as Camp Metalhead and educational partnerships, and has prepared dozens of Rhode Islanders for the metalworking trade through the Weld To Work program. The Yard is also home to Public Projects, which produces one-of-a-kind street and park amenities, including art bike racks, tree guards, and trash cans that can be seen throughout New England.
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