Color Fields, 2023- Ongoing
This is a new public art project for the City of Cambridge’s LInear Park. This concept combines the historical context of the brickmaking industry, the impact of industrial pollution, the use of color fields and patterning, and attributes of the Linear Park site. Primary materials will be bricks and very low planted matter. The effect will be visual and tactile. The artwork will be experienced as a suite of three moments along the length of Linear Park.
For my artist in residency with the National Park Service I engaged with New Bedford residents in the rich symbolism of the street lamps, the whaling industry, and the immense figural presence of Melville's Moby Dick. Specifically I explored Chapter 42 “The Whiteness of the Whale” and began to explore the irrational obsession with the ‘White Whale’ as an analogy of living with the contaminated waterfront. Woven into this is shining a light on the racism found in the text, and from the text I created a dictionary of whiteness, prompting a personal delve into my own whiteness.
Pictured here are installation shots from the Arist in Residency exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum, 2022.
Acrylic paint on acrylic mirror, laser printed paper, adhesive. 20"w x 20" d x 24"h
Harvard Artist Dan Borelli @danborelli and Worcester Polytechnic Scientist Marco Kaltofen @marcokaltofen are the keepers of a global radioactive zoo; collecting samples, objects, and stories from locally-based citizen-scientists.
We are combining our various field-based methods towards a set of content aimed at communicating nuclear specimens to a general audience.
Here's how we're going to achieve this.
Extracting Exotic data from mundane objects
Data Harvesting: Deploying Safecast devices
Ground Truthing: Mapping the spatial network of impact
Specimens: The zoo of radiological objects
Open Call: Globally sharing the Methodology & Data with other sites of concern
First Places of Inquiry: Plymouth Mass., America's Hometown; Fukushima, Japan; Emerging Nuclear States
CONTACT / SOCIAL MEDIA:
For more detailed information, please visit our dedicated website: https://unfriendingtheatom.com/
danborellistudio@gmail.com - mpkaltofen@gmail.com
Insta: @danborelli - @marcokaltofen - @unfriendingtheatom
Twitter: @danborelli - @mkaltofen - @unfriendingthe1
#unfriendingtheatom #scienceisreal #environmentaljustice #disruptiveart #artmakingchange
#artivism #scienceandart #artandscience #citizenscience #interventions #publicart #activism
I’m currently the artist-in-residence at the Blackstone River Valley, National Historical Park. I’m exploring this 48 mile long rivershed that began the industrial revolution in north america. I will more focused on the Slater Mill, the first site of industrialization in this country, as a meeting point to conduct my ‘Ground-Truthing’ workshops with interested participants.
Upcoming public workshop: August 25th, 3pm, 2021
Exhibit on View: March 8-April 23, 2021
Babson College, Hollister Gallery
This exhibition focuses on Dan Borelli's ongoing artwork in Ashland, Massachusetts and the EPA's Superfund site, the Nyanza Colorant Plant. This project encompasses research, activism, social engagement, land ownership, and interventions in public space to address the ongoing issue of a local community residing atop a toxic legacy. But in many ways, it also addresses larger questions about human relationships to the environment, stewardship, and the concept of long durations.
Watch Professor Beth Wynstra interview Artist, Dan Borelli and learn more about his exhibition, Chasing Color, Ashland, MA and Nyanza. Running time: 47 minutes and 40 seconds.
http://player.vimeo.com/video/518785791
I was invited to join a public protest in downtown Plymouth Massachusetts titled ‘Under the Rock’. I brought with me my exact-scaled replica of the Plymouth Rock that I mounted on wheels so it could remove itself from its architectural artifice and encounter citizens today. By decontextualizing the rock from its monumental canopy, we can begin to deconstruct the power this stone holds over our identities today.
In the images here you can see me walking the rock through the streets of Plymouth. I also created this flyer that brings the timescale of nuclear waste into the measurement of time in the construct of this country today.
LOCAL ECOLOGIES is an exhibition, newly commissioned artworks, and public programming across three UMass campuses. Spanning Eastern Massachusetts, the campuses of UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, and UMass Lowell belong to landscapes with diverse coastal and river ecosystems, as well as layered indigenous, colonial, and industrial histories. The LOCAL ECOLOGIES initiative presents contemporary, place-based art practices that bring our ecologies and land use histories into new focus.
The centerpiece of LOCAL ECOLOGIES are multidisciplinary artworks commissioned from artists who have lived and worked in Eastern Massachusetts. These will include both site-specific works for individual campuses, and additional works featured in a touring exhibition to be presented in Boston, Lowell, and New Bedford throughout fall 2019 and spring 2020. The initiative includes programming specific to each campus community and a scholarly catalogue.
Artists:
Dan Borelli, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Duy Hoàng, Sarah Kanouse & Nicholas Brown, Plotform: Jane Marsching + Andi Sutton, Matthew Mazzotta, Evelyn Rydz, and Andrew Yang
Traveling Exhibition Schedule:
UMass Boston
University Hall Gallery
September 3, 2019 – October 26, 2019
Reception: Thursday, September 19th | 5-8pm
UMass Dartmouth (Star Store Campus in Downtown New Bedford)
University Art Gallery
November 7, 2019 – January 10, 2020
Reception: Thursday, November 14th, AHA! Night, 6 – 8:30 pm
UMass Lowell
University Gallery
January 21, 2020 – March 6, 2020
LOCAL ECOLOGIES is organized by Kirsten Swenson, Art History, UMass Lowell; Sam Toabe, Gallery Director, UMass Boston; and Rebecca Uchill, Art Education, Art History, and Media Studies, UMass Dartmouth.
I was the Artist-in-Residence at the New Bedford Whaling Historical National Park for spring 2019. I used their Makerspace area to explore my ongoing focus on the spatial network of the industrialization of the american landscape via the ruins left behind, specifically Superfund sites- the image of the Makerspace glowing at night scene here. Having grown up within a contaminated community, I know the complicated relationship between contamination/site/archive/health/placemaking and identity shaping. For this artist in residency I engaged with New Bedford residents because of the rich symbolism of the street lamps, the whaling industry, and the immense figural presence of Melville's Moby Dick. With visitors I led them on a workshop entitled ‘Ground-Truthing’ whereby we collectively annotate an official map with their view from the inside and thus I learn their cognitive mapping of the superfund site. I also wove into the discussion the irrational obsession with the ‘White Whale’ as an analogy of living with the contaminated waterfront.
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/air-dan-borelli.htm
These images are from my ongoing log I keep as I enter into new publics, contact me directly if you’re interested in my artist’s research report on this project.
This exhibition documents artist Dan Borelli’s 8-year-long exploration of the Nyanza Superfund site in Ashland, Massachusetts. Named for a textile dye plant that operated for sixty years, Nyanza is one of the first ten sites addressed by the United States Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act to clean sites contaminated by hazardous waste. Through a sustained socially-engaged art process, Borelli has produced videos, exhibitions, events, temporary public art forms, and a permanent public park. Together these works confront an ongoing and difficult community relationship to Ashland’s toxic land and cancer cluster. The project was supported by grants from Art Place America and the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Creative Placemaking program.
Borelli is a native of Ashland and current Framingham Massachusetts resident. Dan holds a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design with a concentration in Art, Design, and the Public Domain. He also holds a BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and was selected to attend their Rome Program for a full academic year. Since 2000, he has worked at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design as the Director of Exhibitions and has managed well over a hundred projects at various scales featuring global leaders in the fields of architecture, art, landscape, and urban planning and design. For more information about Borelli and his work, see groundedvisionaries.org/gsd_news/dan-borelli.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND FASHION: A PANEL DISCUSSION
Date: March 6, noon-1:30pm
Location: CVPA Star Store Campus, 715 Purchase Street, New Bedford, MA 02740
This panel will consider the relationship between fashion production/design and issues in environmental and social justice.
Featuring: Dr. Nikolay Anguelov, author of The Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and its Negative Impact on Environment and Society (CRC Press, 2015); Dan Borelli, artist featured in Chasing Color (on view in CVPA Campus gallery Feb 15-April 1, 2019), and Ranger Andrew Schnetzer, a National Park Service (NPS) Servicewide Uniform Committee member and former technical adviser to the NPS uniform program manager. Moderated by Petra Slinkard, Nancy B. Putnam Curator of Fashion and Textiles, Peabody Essex Museum.
ROUNDTABLE ON COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Date: March, 27, 12:00 - 1:30pm
Location: CVPA Star Store Campus, 715 Purchase Street, New Bedford, MA 02740
Join artists Matthew Mazzotta, whose design work is focused on art, activism, and urbanism, and Dan Borelli, whose large-scale public art focuses on ecology and communities, to discuss various approaches and ethics for community-engaged cultural production. Matthew Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our relationships and experiences. His community-specific public projects integrate new forms of civic participation and reveal how spaces have the potential to become distinct sites for intimate, radical, and meaningful exchanges. His Storefront Theater was recently awarded “Architecture Project of the Year” by Dezeen Awards in London. Dan Borelli is an artist, curator, and producer whose practice intersects identity, ecology, and publics. His recent projects include We The Publics with Emmanuel Pratt, recently featured as part of HubWeek, Boston, and the Ashland Nyanza Project, currently featured in the CVPA Campus Gallery exhibition Chasing Color. This event is part of the 2018-2020 initiative , a multimodal series of programs organized between UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, and UMass Lowell, and is also associated with the exhibition Chasing Color, on view at CVPA Campus gallery from February 15 - April 2, 2019.
This program is associated with the Local Ecologies initiative, organized at UMass Dartmouth by Dr. Rebecca Uchill.
CVPA Campus Gallery
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road, Dartmouth, MA 02747
Gallery hours: Monday–Thursday 10 am–4 pm and Friday 10 am–noon
www.umassd.edu/cvpa/galleries
www.facebook.com/UmassDartmouthGalleries
gallery@umassd.edu
Contact: Viera Levitt, Gallery Director
For more information on the Ashland Nyanza Project:
http://www.ashlandnyanzaproject.com/
This is a design+build collaboration with Jessee Designs. We created a set of movable panels whose differing surface treatments inspires differing responses to prompts selected by the #consciousharvard team. The goal is to foster public dialogue around diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias. The panels are now moving around the Harvard Campus as teaching tools for their initiative.
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/consciousharvard
Come learn about, discuss, and sign a petition to add our proposal for a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution. We The Publics is a participatory exhibition with the explicit aim of restoring democracy and truth in the republic of the United States of America. A truly discursive project, we welcome any and all people to share thoughts publicly or privately in our ‘Self-Reflection’ selfie zone. We will have a new theme of PUBLIC for each day of HUBweek, such as PUBLIC LAND, PUBLIC ENERGY, PUBLIC.
Ongoing collaboration with Emmanuel Pratt and for Hubweek we collaborated with Rhonda Fazio of Dyer Maker Studio
Plymouth Rock
There is an interesting set of object relations in how we shape our national identities to geological formations. In the case of the current form of the U.S.A., we claim the Plymouth Rock in Plymouth Massachusetts as a type of creationist folklore as white settlers were alleged to have landed on the rock in 1620. Yet, the first documented claim of this story occurs in 1741 meanwhile the rock has been moved, cracked, and portions have been removed and are in other locations; a chunk is in a church in Brooklyn New York for example. In 1880 the majority of the rock was moved back to the shoreline in Plymouth and staged along a wharf with an architectural structure and, during this restaging of history, the date ‘1620’ was inscribed on its surface.
Mayflower and Native American Markers
Meanwhile the ‘Mayflower’ ship, a replica, is visible just north as it’s docked in downtown Plymouth Harbor. Its complicated histories are latent and marked only by a ‘Squanto’ statue that stands on a hillside as a prominent noble savage. There is no set of objects or markers with inscriptions authored by the Wampanoag Tribe down by the Harbor but I did find a rock with a plaque placed by the ‘United American Indians of New England, in honor of Metacomet (King Philip). It states that upon his execution his head was impaled on a pike and displayed in the public space of Plymouth for 20 years. One hand was sent to Boston and the other to England and his surviving family and many of the Native American combatants were sold into slavery in the West Indies by the English victors.
Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant
Just south of the Plymouth Rock the shore turns and creates an inward horseshoe shape that is not visible from the shore. Within this shape sites the aptly named Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant. Set for decommissioning in 2020, it holds the worst possible safety rating by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There are no clear plans for how the spent casings and radioactive waste will be safely handled, stored, and possibly permanently interred in Plymouth.
The Ashland-Nyanza Project was featured at the Practice Space in Cambridge Ma. as part of their ‘City Box’ series, an ongoing exploration into various contexts contained within their display case situated near their front window. For this installation I added a set of programmable lights that change hue, showing how color impacts our perception of the everyday and how different hues can both reveal and conceal truths.
For more information on the Ashland Nyanza Project:
'WHAT LIES BENEATH THE SURFACE'
Since I began 'The Ashland Nyanza Project', people have been asking where is the contamination today? To answer this I created a spatial intervention where the scientific color gradients of the below-grade contamination are transposed to the existing street lighting grid. Given that the Nyanza site had 100 different source chemicals, what remains is a unique cocktail of sludge below grade. The plume moves around across time but the concentrations appear fairly consistent. The colors signify areas of concentration- Red being the most concentrated and slowly decreasing into Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and the Purple roughly mapping the extents of the monitoring area. The result is a polychromatic environment that shifts color in order to create a new cognitive map of place.
For more information on the Ashland Nyanza Project:
This is located on a town owned parcel behind the left-field fence at the Ashland Middle School Baseball Field. The healing garden transforms a publicly accessed area near the Superfund site into a space for contemplation. With a local team overseen by the New England Laborers Training Academy, we have created a polychromatic sundial and a rainwater harvest table for the Ashland Public Schools science curriculum to use. Here you can retreat and consider the overall implications of the various histories, geographies, and human impact on this high ground known as Megunko Hill.
To access the garden, you can park on the MBTA access road and walk along a path behind the Baseball Field. We are currently working with the Town to create an access point on the road as well as signage along the road.
DONATING
In the summer of 2017 the colored plexiglass panels were vandalized, unfortunately. If you’re interested in making a donation towards the repairs and the overall maintenance costs of this site, we have partnered with the Arts Company, a Cambridge-based non-profit that has supported this project from the outset.
MEMORIAL PAVERS
Do you know someone from Ashland who has passed away from cancer? Are you interested in having a stone granite paver engraved with your loved one's name? We have a local vendor ready to create these memory stones for us!
VOLUNTEERING
Or are you interested in volunteering on the creation of Phase II, notably the plantings of the Public Garden elements? If so, please email admin@ashlandnyanzaproject.com
Click below to view the stand alone website for this project
Continuing the focus on color and identity- this series explores how colors, designs, and symbols shape our sense of self both individually and collectively through the compositions in the national flags of sovereign states. The name is a double-entendre, as ‘Leviathan’ is more commonly referred to as a powerful sea monster that threatens humanity and yet this reference obscures the important book by Thomas Hobbes on the social contract of statecraft and the important role that governments can, and should, play in avoiding war.
The first image is a compilation of all 24 countries whose flags are comprised only of Red, White, and Blue. The second image superimposes the wireframe design of all flags, from every country, from all over the world. The third image is a collection of all flags that feature weaponry while the last image is a collection of all the stars. I guess this project asks the question, if we’re too reliant upon nationalism to form our identities, aren’t we creating a new ‘Leviathan’, a type of monster that threatens humanity?
Within the Ashland Public Library resides one of the EPA's first Field Repositories for a Superfund Site. During the initial stages of cleanup in 1988, the people of Ashland demanded that remediation findings be made public and the EPA agreed to launch this important program. Over 25 years later as we look at the collection of binders, we can skim the history of the contaminants. What's not here are the stories of people, how they were impacted, the culture of loss—the narrative of the contaminated. This exhibit juxtaposed the qualitative stories from people within the space of the quantitative data from the EPA. Working with the EPA and using their data, a scale model and set of mappings helped people orient and to project their own memories onto this subject. It culminated in an reflection station where visitors could browse new books that we purchased under the subject of ecology and leave us their own personal reflections.
The artistic concept is based on the analog animation technique of the zoetrope, but rather than have a static graphic applied to the walls, I will program the lighting to daily shift its color and patterns. The sequence is specific to your motion through the Cambridge Street Underpass; from a distance you will see light leaking from the mouth of this urban cave. As you descend into the tunnel you enter into a saturated field of color and your vehicular motion blends the lighting stations into a ‘chromatrope’. Traveling at a rate of 25 miles per hour, it will take you around 10 seconds to traverse the full length of the tunnel transforming this space into an urban device for animation.
For pedestrians and bikers alike, the walls will appear as abstract fields of color and blend at their specific rates of speed. Given the amount of control available to program the lighting, this project will become a dynamic public art piece. Each day will be a unique experience based upon the spatial programming outlined by the artist.
Project originated for the City of Cambridge Massachusetts, and is currently on hold awaiting final installation.
The sociologist Ulrich Beck has stated that we live in a ‘Risk Society’ and that risk is spread unevenly in relation to the rewards of profit. In relation to Ashland’s Nyanza Superfund Site, I noticed how we in Ashland took on the risk of color production while the profits went to the urban sales offices; Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago amongst others. I filled a briefcase of dirty dirt from Ashland and went to Chicago to return it to the office that once sold products that contaminated our people. It was a performance of futility with my own failure to reverse the extraction process and reverse the remittance with dirt. Why? Because when I went to the exact location of the previous offices I discovered that the building and even the street address no longer exist.
This consists of a quick-hitting tutorial across ‘Color Economies’ to evidence our own social bias of color systems thereby elevating the experiential over the alphanumerical. Color is relation, slippery, and deeply personal. To heighten one’s own perceptual apparatus, I created a set of boxes that only have primary colors and yet, when viewed in person, you can experience the combination of the separate colors and a third color emerges. I culminate the lesson in individual surveys. You can contact Dan directly if you’re interested in hosting a color tutorial, learning your own unique color profile with the opportunity to obtain your one of a kind color object.
