Illuminating Futures: Ashland Massachusetts

Dan Borelli

Funding Received: 2014
Ashland, MA
$75,000
Funding Period: 1 year and 5 months

Ashland, MA (population 14,700) is home to an EPA superfund site created by the Nyanza chemical dye company. Artist Dan Borelli seeks to produce a public conversation around the remediation of this site and seeks to create a community asset out of a problematic history. Mr. Borelli has proposed creating an oral and visual history of the community’s relationship with the superfund site that will be housed at the local public library. He has proposed changing the hues of the streetlights in relationship to the contaminants that are still in the soil. And he has proposed creating and designing a polychromatic public garden that will reference the chemical dye pollutants of the past while further remediating the soil. These three interventions are targeted toward helping the community recover from its trauma and prepare to move beyond it through redevelopment and into resiliency.

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See below for recent updates, press, and events from this project

blog
My original intention was to open all three phases of this project at once; an exhibition at the public library which is the source of... Read More
press
Aug 18, 2015
“Illuminating Futures: The Ashland & Nyanza Project,” Dan Borelli, exhibition designer, on display Sept. 22 through Dec. 19. Read More
blog
Most nights, the streetlights that illuminate Ashland, Massachusetts, are a uniform white. They shine down on typical small-town things: families getting dinner on Main Street,...Read more