LANGSTON, a new nonprofit operating out of the historic Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, has announced its first hire: executive director Tim Lennon.
LANGSTON, a new nonprofit operating out of the historic Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, has announced its first hire: executive director Tim Lennon.
The search, said LANGSTON board president Inye Wokoma, was “an extremely long, extremely deliberate process — to say we’re elated would be an understatement.”
Lennon is eager to start building on Langston Hughes’ decades-long legacy as a hub of arts and culture. “We’re in uncharted waters here,” he said. “For over 40 years, all the programming at Langston was run through the city — everybody in the building was a city employee. LANGSTON is like a nonprofit startup building the team.”
While it’s too early to talk about specifics (“we’ve got 10 million ideas right now,” he joked), Lennon thinks this is “a critical time because of the demographic shift in the Central Area and the city, with a clear lack of organizations by and for people of color. There aren’t many black folks left in Seattle and aren’t that many black arts organizations left in Seattle.”
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In broad strokes, he plans to reach back to the people who shaped — and were shaped by — Langston Hughes programs in the 1970s, “highlight the amazing talent we’ve always had in this city” and “bring brilliant black folks from around the country to be in dialogue with talent locally.”
Local arts institutions, he added, “are putting out a lot of really great black art — but despite how great the art is, despite working with awesome, awesome artists, they are institutions who traditionally don’t have black leadership.”
Lennon came to Seattle in 2001 and quickly started putting down roots in the city’s arts and culture scene. He has worked with Elliott Bay Book Company, One Reel, the Office of Arts and Culture (where he oversaw the Mayor’s Arts Awards), Seattle Center Foundation, and has served on the boards of Washington Bus and the Seattle Music Commission. (He also used to tend bar at Hidmo Eritrean Cuisine, the now-defunct restaurant and cultural center.)
In 2015, Lennon became the first executive director of the Vera Project, the youth-driven music and arts nonprofit at the Seattle Center.
“We were looking for someone who really knew the Seattle arts community,” Wokoma said. “We’re extremely excited to have him on board.”
LANGSTON will share the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute building – originally constructed as a Jewish synagogue in 1915 and now owned by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation – with a few other organizations, including the CD Forum for Arts and Ideas and the city’s Teen Summer Musical program.
As Seattle keeps changing, Lennon also hopes LANGSTON will become a beacon and a lightning rod for productive (and sometimes difficult) conversations about what the city was and what it’s becoming.
“It’s a new century, a new day, with new challenges and forces in our community,” Lennon said. “And we want people who’ve scattered to come back to the old neighborhoods — like churches, arts institutions are a way of bringing people back together.”
Lennon’s first day at LANGSTON is Jan. 3.