The Industrial Arts Workshop (IAW), a Hazelwood-based nonprofit, has earned a spot in the Pittsburgh International Airport’s Art in the Airport program, and is on display through April 2025. The artwork on exhibit was created by eight of the program’s teenage students, all of whom are learning to weld as a creative process.
The work was produced during IAW's most recent summer welding bootcamp. Each year, IAW selects a community partner to build a piece of public artwork around. In 2024 they partnered with the Swissvale-based POWER, a nonprofit assisting women in their addiction recovery journey. After hearing the women’s stories, students were tasked with translating the organization's core values into a piece of art that could unify and inspire.
“[There are] a couple of flowers that are facing a sun and it represents community and growth,” said student artist Natalie Daniels. “The sun is there to represent the help and the power it gives the women, to empower them for their recovery journey.”
IAW began in the summer of 2014 with founder and executive director Tim Kaulen’s mobile sculpture workshop, which evolved into a series of pop-up workshops held around the Pittsburgh area based out of his mobile welding lab. In 2018, Kaulen, in partnership with the Hazelwood Initiative, purchased four connected buildings to create a permanent home for the workshops.
It’s important to IAW leadership that students like Daniels are able to connect the welding skills they’re learning to actual potential careers. IAW offers both an after-school welding lab as well as a summer welding bootcamp to teach Hazelwood’s youth. In December, eight students from the lab received their D1.1 certification from the American Welding Society. The certification allows students to begin working in the field immediately, should they choose to.
“A lot of the folks working for [the unions] right now are aging, they're nearing retirement, so there's this really big need for young people to come in, learn how to work in the trades, and then take these jobs,” said Maura Bainbridge, assistant director at Industrial Arts Workshop.
In addition to exposing students to potential fine arts careers, IAW takes students into the professional trades spaces in partnership with local unions and companies, such as the ironworkers and steamfitters.
“I think we're really lucky that we get to spend all this time with a lot of young people who have all these creative ideas and they come here and they want to learn how to work and learn how to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives,” Bainbridge said.
The Pittsburgh International Airport’s Art in the Airport program is featuring Industrial Arts Workshop student welding art through April.
