Iron Lady
Drake Patten makes creative sparks fly at the Steelyard
By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 20, 2006
Things could have taken a turn for the worse when Providence Steel and Iron, after 98 years of operation, closed shop in 2002. “You have this 2.9-acre piece of property on the other side of you, when you already have a strip mall on the other side,” says 27-year-old metals artist Clay Rockefeller, referring to the stores that opened in Eagle Square in 2003, displacing the underground arts hotbed Fort Thunder and the 100-some artists who called it home. “And you’re trying to preserve some sort of the integrity, or the aspects of what was really great about this place. The fear was basically that if we didn’t get our shit together and purchase it, it was going to turn into a Wal-Mart. It just was not a pretty thought.”
Rockefeller, who, with three partners, had spearheaded the conversion of the adjacent Monohasset Mill complex into live-work lofts for artists, joined forces with fellow artist Nick Bauta to buy the Providence Steel and Iron site, reinventing it as the Steelyard (www.thesteelyard.org). The vision, as Rockefeller puts it, was for “an industrial arts facility and education center that would simultaneously celebrate the site’s history and the industrial heritage of Providence and Rhode Island as a whole.” A nonprofit, Woonasquatucket Valley Community Build (WVCB), was launched in 2003 to administer the effort, encompassing studio space for industrial artists and classes in welding, ceramics, blacksmithing, foundry, and glass.
Three years later, WVCB is ready to integrate a new level of professionalism into what has been more of a shoot-from-the-hip operation, hiring Drake Patten as the Steelyard’s new executive director. A former archaeologist, Patten, 42, led what is now known as the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities from 1999-2004, and then directed an artists’ colony in Austerlitz, New York. She started at the Steelyard two months ago, supplanting Peter Eiremann, who moved to Maine.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation, which took place last week at the Icon Café on Valley Street.
BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL: How would you sum up what goes on at the Steelyard? I know Clay said, “When people ask me what we do, [and] they come away from our conversations, they’re like, ‘It sounds cool, though I’m not really sure what he told me.’ ”
DRAKE PATTEN: [Laughs] It’s exactly right. And actually, that’s one of the funniest things about the Steelyard. When I first came back and I was [telling] everyone, “So I’m going to be at the Steelyard,” and they would say, “That’s so cool!” And I would say, yeah, well, what do you think the Steelyard does? And everybody has a different answer. In some ways, everybody who’s involved in the Steelyard has a different answer. And as an executive director, I would say that’s a catastrophe, because everybody should know what you do. But in fact, that’s part of the key to the Steelyard — that people come there and take away different things. That’s part of what makes it work on some level.
We teach welding and blacksmithing, everything from welding classes that take place over the course of five or six weeks, but also weekend welding workshops. For example, this year we had a “Welding with Mom” workshop for Mother’s Day. And ceramics, and also glass-casting and bronze-casting. So they’re all industrial arts that can take an industrial focus or a fine arts focus, really.
[We have] open studios. People [who] want to use the very equipment that they can’t have in their own space are able to do that. You can rent time in the studio. Another big part is that we do a lot of collaborative work with organizations. So we’ll do a collaborative project with the Met School, or we’ll install some kind of urban furniture piece in a park where kids are playing. We’re out doing stuff in the community; we’re collaborating. The urban furniture line has been a really amazing growth. We now have garbage cans all over town. We make bike racks, tree guards, garbage cans. It looks like we’re going to be developing a bench now. We are competitive with the stuff that you can order out of catalogues.
We get calls all the time from people who are interested in getting our opinion on stuff, or they want to start an arts organization somewhere else, or they might want to come and do something with us. And what’s amazing is, the staff gets together, and there are all these ideas on the table immediately. So I also think it’s a bit of a think tank, without anyone ever having defined it that way. There’s not a person there who would ever define themselves in that way. But I think it’s happening there, sort of in an ad hoc kind of way.
BS: What is your budget?
DP: The budget we just passed is right under $400,000, which is extraordinary. It has doubled each year, incrementally. So last year it was $200,000, and the year before that, it was just under $100,000. It’s been a steady climb. And it’s a really manageable budget. It’s an extraordinary achievement for an organization this young.
BS: You’ve spoken with enthusiasm about working in Rhode Island’s nonprofit community. What are some of the things that you most love about it?
DP: I think the scale of this community is both a curse and a blessing. But it also allows for innovation in the way we do our work. It allows for collaboration that’s actually quite real and grounded. It’s not just on paper. And also, interestingly enough — I’m not sure everyone thinks of this — but Rhode Island allows you to make mistakes and pick yourself up from that. So organizations can falter, and people give you room. Maybe it’s the spirit of the people who come here. Maybe it’s the size. Maybe it’s the way people have belief in each other. But there is something about being here.
It was amazing to live in the Berkshires, in the middle of what’s considered such a cultural mecca, and feel that it has nothing on Rhode Island. Not that they weren’t great people, not to say there wasn’t stuff to do, but it just doesn’t have that kind of sense that we’re in this together, and we’re going to make this work. And even though a lot of people will say, “Oh, we’ve got replication of nonprofits,” I still think that there’s a lot of support within that, and that’s so significant. You don’t have enough funding to do it all, and all those things are true, like in any community. But we’ll take hold of each other, and do it. And I love that.
BS: When you came back, what stood out for you about the Steelyard?
DP: I’d been very aware of what the Steelyard’s been doing. It was very clear when they were talking big dreams of what the place could be — I just knew that they’d make it happen. So I’ve just really had an eye on it, and really felt like it grew naturally. I felt it grew in a legitimate way. I hate the word “authenticity” — these words we overuse. But it is the most authentic place. I really like affecting the local. And I like the local to provide national opportunity in the sense of a model. And I feel like the Steelyard is deeply about the local, but has the potential to show far and wide the power of that. I believe that if something is built truly, it’s always a good model. Not to be replicated, but to see the inspiration of what made the thing happen, and [to] try to bring that to the world. Plus, I get to take all the classes, which is pretty fabulous. BS: Rockefeller told me that one reason they looked to you for executive director was the need to rein in the sort of rampant idealism — I think his words were “tighten up the ship” and “batten down the hatches” — without losing the sense of possibility. And he said you fit perfectly with that. How do you plan to do that? DP: That’s exactly the challenge — to keep what’s the wide-ranging possibility, [the] kind of “wow, let’s do this tomorrow” — keep that energy — but allow the organization to grow and seem serious enough for funders to want to be part of it. Sitting here today, two months in, do I have the master plan? No. But what I think is really important is for the organization to have a little bit of a four- [to] five-year-plan of what we’d like to look like. It’s such a young organization, and it’s been moving so fast, that there hasn’t even been the time to slow down, take a breath, and think about that. So what we’re facing is acquisition of the property. [Woonaquatucket Valley Community Build currently leases the Steelyard site from the for-profit corporation established by Rockefeller and Bauta to acquire the property.] So we’re looking at an acquisition phase, and development of the site, and taking our mission and also looking at — is everything we’re doing totally tied to our mission? If not, why not? Can it be? [And] if it really isn’t, letting it go. We’ll probably do a little fine-tuning of the mission. It’s really a save-the-world mission right now, which I think is the energy of the place. But we do have to write something a little tighter. That’s part of the first year’s work, things like that. And the organization’s also rethinking — and I think this is something we very much have to offer Providence and others — how a nonprofit works. There is about a 50 percent earned-income strategy at the Steelyard right now. Meaning, we support what we do through income from our tuition, from the urban furniture line, from our foundry. Again, like the rest of the organization, the foundry allows artists to do work they might not be able to do, as in bronze-casting. It’s expensive — you’re not likely to set up your own foundry. People can come in with one small sculpture and get it cast with us. They might have to wait a little while, but it can happen. So we’re supporting that art form. More and more foundries are shutting down. It’s very hard for an artist to find an affordable place to cast one thing. So that’s another form of income for us. Nonprofits have been talking about earned income for years now, because everything else is drying up — what can we sell, what can we do, to bring in income? BS: Because nonprofits rely heavily on grants, but if the grants dry up, then . . . DP: You’re screwed. All your money’s gone. So it’s been a trend to look at how to make social change through a different kind of economy. But the interesting thing about the Steelyard is, it’s really exploring this in an incredible way. And if we’re able to do this successfully, which I fully believe we are, then that offers a model. Yes, nonprofits are important. We’ve got to keep them around. And here’s a way we might be able to do it if the traditional way doesn’t work. Which we’re seeing is not working. As the government continues to cut social services and the private sector is asked to step up to the plate, there are so many organizations and so few dollars. So nonprofits have to be thinking about themselves as businesses in some way, without losing sight of the mission [that] makes them different from a business. BS: What is the symbiotic relationship between the Steelyard and Providence? What does one have to offer the other? DP: It goes back to that word I hate — authenticity. This is happening in the right place at the right time. And there’s something magical about that. This is taking a steelyard that was shutting down, which is symbolic of the lost industry in the state. It’s really painful, when you think about it — the loss of industry, industrial jobs, manufacturing. So here this steelyard comes up in the middle of a place that was going to close down, and just become a brownfield with God knows what, maybe more condos, I don’t know. It doesn’t. It stays, in this really interesting way. And it reintroduces what Rhode Island has always been about. If you look back historically, you started out with fine craftsmanship, metalworking. Historically, that’s our past. The real hands-on craftwork that happened in Rhode Island, individual craftman’s shops, and then we had the jewelry industry, and metalworking. So we had all this history. And abruptly, we hit this century, and it really stopped. Many places are completely gone — other places are dying. There’s something wonderful about a group of young people saying, “You know what? We’re going to just change that story, here, on this little three-acre site. We’re going to rethink that. And we’re going to offer an alternative.” We’re re-inserting this tradition in a very new way, in a public way, in a community-produced way, and we’re going to show that yes, artists can be employed here. Metalwork can survive here. BS: How would you sum up the mission of the Steelyard? DP: I would see it as really allowing people to come in and explore the creative possibilities of industrial arts. Allowing people to come in and try something that they never imagined they could do. In a larger way, we’re also trying to say, this is a local story. These are things that are produced locally. One of our major things, we allow local artists to work local. We provide opportunities at the Steelyard that individual studios can rarely afford to have. We are really creating this artists’ support system that is unique. And it’s not just about what machines we have — though we have fabulous machines — it’s about connecting people with a lot of experience, people who are just starting out . . . . [If I] were to write one-sentence mission statement about the Steelyard, it really is about creating this crossroads, this place where people can come together, share their ideas, explore new ideas, get shaken up by something they’d never thought of. BS: So you don’t think this project could happen anywhere else the way it’s happened here? DP: No.
