This week each year is a special one for Handshouse Studio & the Buttonwood Park Zoo. Students from the Mass College of Art & Design Toys for Elephants class deliver unique enrichment objects they have designed & built during the course of this semester-long Handshouse Studio workshop to Emily & Ruth, Buttonwood Park Zoo’s resident elephants. This week would have marked the 10th consecutive year of designing, building & delivering enrichment objects for these elephants & their managers. But like so much this year, the Toys for Elephants students were interrupted by COVID-19. The week before spring break, the class traveled to New Bedford to present their designs to the Buttonwood Park Zoo animal managers for final review.

The presentations were met with enthusiasm, & even remarks that their models were so well built, they could be used as enrichment objects for another set of residents at the Zoo...the Monkeys! We all loved the idea, & toured their newly built “Rivers, Rainforests, & Reefs” exhibit, planning to discuss making this into a new Handshouse collaboration with the zoo some day. Someday came sooner than any of us expected. The students left for vacation expecting to return to Mass Art’s state-of-the art wood & metals shops a week later to build their designs for the elephants. But when that couldn’t happen, we did not give up on building enrichment objects.

While access to advanced fabrication equipment was not available to make large-scale toys to withstand the play of elephants...these students did have the creative capacity to fabricate objects for the much smaller clients we had just met in the Rainforest exhibit. So this week...for the first time in 10 years, we will not be packing up the truck & trailer to drive our signature Toys for Elephants down to Emily & Ruth. This week, we are taking a moment to share some of the toys that were delivered last year & sending out thoughts to Emily, Ruth & all the elephants & elephant caretakers around the world who are out there, & showing up to work each day to make sure these animals are cared for, fed, & enriched even though the zoos & sanctuaries are shuttered to human visitors. It may be that we couldn’t deliver this semester’s many inventive designs this week. But we will be back soon with more Toys for Elephants. AND stay tuned to see what this semester’s students did for the Monkeys instead…