Community Art

Community Art is a co-creation with people, and is necessarily a collaborative, empathetic, and creative process, resulting in new artwork that showcases local identity.

Collaborative design and community engagement are part of May Babcock’s skillsets, and she has worked with both elderly and youth communities.

The Mind’s Eye

Babcock visited 22 Rhode Island senior homes to share how to make paper, and collect each community’s stories and memories of favorite natural places they’ve been.

In 2019, a second iteration engaged northern New Hampshire elderly communities.

SCLT Galego Community Farm Projects

In 2017, the artist started volunteered at Southside Community Land Trust (SCLT)’s Galego Community Farm at the Pawtucket Housing Authority Galego Court in Pawtucket RI. May continues to share papermaking from the farm’s plant fibers to build community, expanded the reach of existing programs, and provided access to high quality arts education.

Pawtucket Paper Center

Babcock is a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow. With support from NAS, the UPenn Center for Social Impact Strategy, and the Barr Foundation, she piloted Pawtucket Paper Center in 2019. This was a creative place-making, community papermaking program.

Babcock is now working on Regenerative Papermaking, a project that grows plants and a sustainable regional paper economy.

¡CityArts! Plant Paper Community Installation

May worked with Providence ¡CityArts! youth, to explore relationships between plant and human histories, and their movements in South Providence via neighborhood exploration and plant-to-paper workshops.