Envisioning Resilience

Running annually since 2021, the Envision Resilience Challenge was founded by philanthropist and investor Wendy Schmidt. Partnering with university art and design studios across the United States, Envision Resilience facilitates climate-change-responsive planning, design, and art innovation through student and community partnerships.

The 2025 Envision Resilience Challenge paired university students with municipal leaders in Harpswell and Bath, Maine, developing creative ideas that aimed to serve “communities facing rising sea levels and challenges related to housing, stormwater management, and coastal infrastructure, habitats, and ecology.”

As much as design solutions help envision practical responses to climate change, public art fosters community connectivity, bolstering their resilience as they face changing coastal environments.

Addy Smith-Reiman’s Public Art Studio participated in the 2025 Envision Resilience Challenge. Smith-Remain shared, “The entire ethos of the student body in the MECA&D class was the empathy and connection to community, and what can you do with objects around that. Each one came up with a very specific need, but it was all rooted in that idea of community.”

Charged with creating art or design proposals to present at the end of the semester, MECA&D students participating in the 2025 Envision Resilience Challenge met with community members in Harpswell and Bath, Maine. “I was really intrigued by taking the students far away to two coastal communities where we had rural and urban options,” said Smith-Reiman. “I would provide as much information and encouragement as possible, and invite each student to respond. Then I help craft what they're responding to… Part one was hearing community needs in Harpswell. Part two [in Bath] really zoned in on what the future of community really is.”

Brian Smith MFA ’20 curated the 2024 and 2025 Envision Resilience Challenge exhibitions. In his own art practice, Smith works in the field of queer ecology and knows better than most the immense value of art as a means to fortify optimism. About art’s role in developing climate resilience, Smith said, “It felt like we were talking about the potentiality of the future, hopefulness, and urgency for addressing the changes that are coming our way. This shift towards optimism has been a way to acknowledge that the world will change, but perhaps we have the power to change with it. In that sense, I think that's the crux of the Envision Resilience Challenge.”

While coastal communities confront the challenges of climate change today, the youth of these communities will inherit the accelerating effects of these changes and are rarely given the resources and care needed to help them reach adulthood on solid ground. In conversations about the Bath projects, there were repeated mentions of the high rates of depression, suicide risk, drug addiction, homelessness, and lack of economic opportunity for Bath teens. The Midcoast Youth Center is facing this sobering reality head-on by providing programs, space, and community, and letting local youth know that they matter and are needed as part of their communities’ future.

Niccole Cormier-Real ’27, a student in Smith-Reiman’s class, proposed the project Roots and S’Wings. She proposed taking a large, unused wooden cross that once stood tall in Bath’s landscape, and, with the help of Bath youth programs and partnership organizations like Bath Housing, Bath Ironworks, Maine Maritime Museum, and Bath Tech, turning it into community swings.

In shaping her proposal for the swings, Cormier-Real took the time to travel around the Bath community and speak with as many people as she could, intent on creating something that would belong to them, so that her conversations and proposals would serve as invitations to participate rather than to extract. “I focus a lot on the process rather than the actual object itself. So for me it's the collaboration, the communication. I’m community and process-based, and I love reusing material.”

As a veteran and mother of four, Cormier-Real is shaped by the powerful bonds and support networks created among military families. She knows all too well what community connections can do for resilience, which is why the community partners, alongside Envision Resilience, are providing the support for her to complete Roots and S’Wings as her MECA&D thesis project.

As the power of public art grows in the Envision Resilience challenge, thanks to the work and guidance of Smith-Reiman, students like Cormier-Real bring their work to communities with generosity and collaboration. “It's a community entry point, a gathering place for conversation. I feel it's such a strong tool,” says Cormier-Real.

Looking to the future of Harpswell and Bath, Maine, Cormier-Real’s Roots and S’wings will emerge as part of Bath’s landscape, Anna Mayer's ’27 tapestry for Harpswell will be hung in their town office, and the interactive activities piloted by other students in the class continue to take place at the Midcoast Youth Center.

“We kept hearing that no matter what infrastructure you have, no matter what architecture or open space, the true element of resilience for the future is community,” said Smith-Reiman. “Throughout MECA&D’s involvement in the 2025 Envision Resilience Challenge, we see how cornerstones of the College’s culture of community, empathy, and resilience align with the challenge and reveal what a powerful tool public art can be in community resilience.”

Words by Ezra Rose Arscott.