Exhibitions 2019: Dan Borelli: Chasing Color

February 15 - April 1, 2019

Opening: Thursday, Feb 21 from 4 to 6:30pm; Artist talk at 5pm

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. Borelli 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.