After more than one year of being run by an interim director, the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park Board of Directors last week announced the hiring of a permanent executive director for the park — Emily Gates Zaengle.

Zaengle, 27, a native if Unadilla Forks, holds advanced degrees in both landscape architecture and museum studies and during the past three years has served as both an intern and a volunteer at the art park.

“I’m really excited. I don’t know if it’s a post made for me or me for it, but it fits,” Zaengle said. “It will be a challenge, but I love challenges and creative problem solving. I’m up for the challenge because I believe in it. And I have a great board of directors that support me and believe in this place.”

“I can’t tell you how thrilled we are,” said SQHAP Board of Directors President John Hunt. “We felt we needed that long-term look at the future, and one of our five-year goals was to get someone in that executive director position and allow them to take the park through our 24th and 25th years and onward — finish out our first quarter century.”

Stone Quarry Hill Art Park will host a day of winter fun from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 24, at the Winner Gallery. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet the new executive director, Emily Zaengle, as well as to sit back with a cup of free hot chocolate and participate in arts and crafts and whatever outdoor activities the weather will allow. The event is free and open to the public, and does not require any reservations. For more information call the park at 655-3196.

Stone Quarry Hill Art Park is one of the first outdoor sculpture parks in the country. The park , which consists of 104 acres of land and more than four miles of hiking trails, showcases the works of emerging and established artists in natural and gallery settings, and offers public programs and educational outreach including exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations, workshops and classes.

Zaengle holds a bachelor’s degree in design and environmental analysis from Cornell University, a master’s degree in landscape architecture from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and a master’s degree in museum studies from Syracuse University. As part of her most recent graduate work, Zaengle photographed 160 farm silos along Route 8 from Utica to Brookfield, documenting the buildings as aesthetic indicators of a changing agricultural landscape.

“Museum studies and landscape architecture isn’t a typical combination, but for me it was really a quest to understand how the two disciplines can and do interact,” she said. “I view museums as a platform for drawing attention to the landscape.”

At Stone Quarry Hill, it is the relationship between art and nature that imbues its core mission, and it is what inspired Dorothy Reister to create the art park more than 20 years ago.

“Art and nature is everywhere in the landscape of Stone Quarry Hill,” Zaengle said. “If you place a piece of art in the landscape, nature acts upon it, changing it. Light, wind, rain all impact and change that piece. … What happens then when we take nature and put it in the gallery, whether it’s a painting, sculpture or fragments of its natural form, doesn’t the landscape become our art? How can we leverage this duality to question our relationship to the environment, to marvel in something we might otherwise have never noticed?”

This relationship between art and nature is something the park’s board of directors wants to put a specific emphasis on in the years ahead — a task they felt Zaengle would be particularly well-suited to do, Hunt said.

“She is impressive, and we’d like to have her here for very long time,” he said.

Zaengle’s introduction to the art park began with an internship in 2012, during which she catalogued and archived all of Reister’s work and helped spearhead the artist-in-residence program. As a volunteer, she served on the committee tasked with re-envisioning the entrance drive of the park.

Revamping the park entrance is one of the many projects Zaengle said is a priority this year, along with revamping the park’s website to make it fresher and more user-friendly, looking at renovating Reister’s house and using it for more park purposes and simply improving and increasing the park’s outreach and educational opportunities for the Central New York area.

“It’s all about connections,” Zaengle said. “We need to be creating a range of events and programs. We also need to do a better job capitalizing on the events we have and the people here at those times, to explain to people who we are and to welcome them back. We don’t want to miss the opportunity to educate people on the art park.”

In addition to the hiring of Zaengle as the new executive director, the SQHAP directors also promoted interim director and office manager Lesley Owens-Pelton to Art Park operations manager. In her new role, Owens-Pelton will oversee the daily operations of the park while also working to grow its presence in the local and regional community.

Owens-Pelton started at the park in August 2013 as interim director after the departure of former Director Sarah Webster. That six-month position turned into a year, and late last year the board decided it wanted to find the appropriate title and role for her, Hunt said.

“We were blessed to get Leslie Owens [in 2013], who had been working at Caz College. She more than filled that interim role and we were all very impressed with what she does for the park on a day-to-day basis,” Hunt said.

The new management configuration of the art park means that Owens-Pelton will oversee the daily operations and Zaengle will survey the long-term goals and aspirations to take Stone Quarry Hill Art Park to the next level.

“I’m very proud of the board and the work they’ve done on this. It’s been a full board effort, 100 percent. There was a unanimous consensus on this,” Hunt said.

For more information about Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, visit stonequarryhillartpark.org or call 655-3196.

Jason Emerson is editor of the Cazenovia Republican. He can be reached at [email protected].