Making it Public: Community-inspired Artmaking in Belchertown

Maude Haak-Frendscho and colleagues from the Belchertown, MA, participated in the 2024 Making it Public for Massachusetts Municipalities cohort and funded the transfer station container murals in 2025. Maude shares her reflections on the process and impact of the project and program in this blog.

Prior to my work with municipal arts and culture programs, I had a career in nonprofit arts commissioning and managing murals, developing site-specific artworks, and programming community events. While I’ve been able to transfer many skills, the steepest learning curve has been to understand, and successfully navigate, the labyrinthine processes for implementing projects under the guidance of MA state laws. Procurement of services and materials for projects is the most markedly different, and was seemingly the key barrier to developing a local public art program in my role developing the Creative Economy Initiative for the Town of Belchertown. The announcement of the Making it Public for Massachusetts Municipalities training and grant program was enticing and timely. The resulting murals from this program exceeded our expectations, and by embodying civic values in the community-engagement process, underscored the importance and impact of municipal public projects with residents.

My colleagues from the Clapp Memorial Library—Cyndi Harbeson, Library Director and Jennifer Whitehead, Youth Librarian—applied with me for the MIP program, and we participated in the training series together led by MAPC and NEFA facilitators. The Clapp Memorial Library has an annual featured public sculpture on their front lawn. Elsewhere in Belchertown, the Belchertown Cultural Council (BCC), Belchertown Community Alliance, and Belchertown Justice Collaborative have also created a sculpture garden at Lake Wallace, a large community mural, and a utility box mural on the Town Common, respectively. We sought to build on this small but growing collection of public artwork in Belchertown as an opportunity to engage and represent local community members.

The Making it Public (MIP) training program was a unique opportunity for the Town of Belchertown to develop practices in public art-making and support, and also to pilot a project with the critical funding provided by NEFA. The training offered many diverse examples from other municipalities across the commonwealth, and important legal and logistical technical assistance for understanding how to navigate public artmaking in alignment with procurement laws as required by municipalities. The training, as well, emphasized equity and community engagement, which were the underlying goals for our team entering into the process, and which came to be a hallmark of our pilot project.

We had a few project ideas going into the process, and as we continued to learn in our training cohort, we brought back takeaways to our colleagues across departments and stumbled into the idea we eventually realized. Talking with Linda Leduc, Department of Public Works (DPW) Director, in another meeting she half-jokingly suggested we paint murals on the Transfer Station containers and we quickly realized that it was, in fact, the right project to pursue. We partnered with the DPW and BCC under the umbrella of the Creative Economy Committee (CEC) to develop a set of three murals on the Transfer Station containers on the theme of sustainability. Cyndi, Jennifer, Linda, Molly Robinson of the BCC and CEC, and I quickly moved forward developing the project with guidance from the CEC and Transfer Station staff.

The Belchertown Transfer Station is a place of gathering in the community, a place where people have come together for political organizing and informally with neighbors to stay connected. Importantly, it's a place where materials are returning into the waste stream. In addition to beautifying the space—the containers were an uninspired brown color—and making it more welcoming, Linda Leduc pointed out that residents should also understand that the materials that they bring to the Transfer Station do not end there, but continue on their journey and take new forms. That community members are an integral part of the bigger picture of reduce, reuse, recycle and regenerate became the grounding themes of both the mural designs and the process for realizing them. 

We sought to embody that ethos of centering the role of community in sustainability throughout, beginning with a responsive feedback loop with colleagues throughout the trainings, a community survey at the Transfer Station and online, and an emphasis on community engagement throughout the design and mural-making process. The call for artwork was guided by community member thoughts gathered in our survey about how Belchertown is committed to sustainability and local imagery that embodies that concept. Each of the selected artists incorporated community feedback into their designs and created a community engagement pathway within either the design development process or the painting process. The murals, once completed, were celebrated with a community celebration, the Trash Gala, featuring sustainability themed activities and a Trash Fashion Contest. Collectively, we engaged 200 residents across ages and backgrounds through a variety of means of participation.

Community members were invited to participate in public art-making on these themes of sustainability, and are reminded every time they visit of those commitments and the roles they played in developing the artwork. Placemaking projects like this have tremendous value, not only on the local economy and for marketing potential, but really importantly in strengthening the social fabric by providing opportunities for community members to connect. They feel a sense of ownership, have a sense of belonging through the process, and can see themselves represented in the work. To have their voices taken seriously and reflected in public space—meaningful sites in their own community—is powerful and transformative. This is important in its own right, and it also provides a foundation for the Town to build stronger ties full of trust and mutuality to carry us into the future together.

Members of our team and members of our creative community in Belchertown had previous community engagement and public art-making experience, and through the MIP cohort had the opportunity to hone those skills in the specific context of the municipality and in ways that both provided a template for moving forward and putting interdepartmental processes into practice. The technical skills and pilot project gave us momentum to develop the municipal public art program, and a critical platform for building community at a time of so much uncertainty, threats to services, and vulnerability of community members. Our small mural project has an outsized impact, engaging and bringing together both a large number and a large range of residents, some now unexpectedly related through this project. Community-engaged public artmaking can transform public spaces while also serving as a model for gathering community members together in care and resilience.