Conversation with Andrew Yang

Conversation with Andrew Yang April 4, 2019 3:30-4:30pm
CVPA Star Store campus, 715 Purchase Street New Bedford, MA 02740

Artist Andrew Yang works across the visual arts, the sciences, and history to explore the naturalcultural. Yang’s work has been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including commissions for the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, (2016) and the Spencer Museum of Art (2019). Yang’s writing and research can be found in Art Journal, Leonardo, Biological Theory, and Antennae. He is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History. This conversation is part of the 2018-2020 initiative Local Ecologies, a multimodal series of programs organized between UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, and UMass Lowell.

Andrew Yang, A Beach (for Carl Sagan), 2016. Photo by Nathan Keay (c) MCA Chicago.
partial view of IO-OX: A Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems, 2015. Photograph by Ugur Eren.

Roundtable on Community Engagement

Roundtable on Community Engagement March 27, 2019, noon-1:30pm
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 Local Ecologies, 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 21-April 2, 2019

Matthew Mazzotta, THE STOREFRONT THEATER Lyons, Nebraska, 2016

Conversation with Jane Marsching

Conversation with Jane Marsching March 21, 2019. 3:30-4:30pm
College of Visual and Performing Arts, CVPA 306
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth/285 Old Westport Rd., Dartmouth MA 02747

Interdisciplinary artist Jane D. Marsching explores our past, present and future human impact on the environment through collaborative research-based practices. Her projects have been sited in museums and galleries as well as weather observatories, public parks, city streets, radio waves, and the internet. She has worked with scientists, educators, kite builders, meteorologists, architects, and musicians, among others. She is a co-founder and member of Platform2: Art and Activism (2009-2012), an experimental forum about creative practices at the intersection of social issues.This conversation is part of the 2018-2020 initiative Local Ecologies, a multimodal series of programs focused on place-based practice in Eastern Massachusetts organized between UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, and UMass Lowell.


Jane Marsching, Carbon Farm version 2.0 at Boston University, spring 2018

Local Ecologies initiative and related programs

Local Ecologies is an inter-campus initiative focused on place-based practice shared between three UMass campuses. The interrelated programming, which will include public talks, course offerings, and new project development, emphasizes contemporary artistic perspectives on ecological sites, from the postindustrial Merrimack River and New Bedford regions to the evolving urban ecologies of Boston and environs. These will be featured in a touring exhibition to be presented in Boston, Lowell, and New Bedford Massachusetts throughout fall 2019 and spring 2020.

The goals of this inter-campus collaboration between UMass Boston (Sam Toabe, Gallery Director), UMass Dartmouth (Rebecca Uchill, Art Education, Art History, and Media Studies), and UMass Lowell (Kirsten Swenson, Art History) is to spark transdisciplinary and cross-institutional exchange that centers on artists’ engagement with environmental, ecological, and land use issues. The ecologies of Eastern Massachusetts will come into focus through the lens of artistic projects on each campus, as well as related courses (“Art + Environment” at UMass Lowell; “Processing Place” at UMass Dartmouth). Confirmed participants include Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Duy Hoàng, Sarah Kanouse+Nick Brown, Jane Marsching, Matthew Mazzotta, and Andrew Yang, with others to be announced.

Andrew Yang, “Two Vehicles,” detail from Flying Gardens of Maybe, 2012-2014. Photograph by the artist.

Social Justice and Fashion


A Panel Discussion March 6, 2019, noon-1:30pm
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 21-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. This program is associated with the exhibition Chasing Color, and is supported by the CVPA Dean’s office.

Dan Borelli, The Ashland-Nyanza Project: Illuminating Futures, 2016.

Chasing Color Exhibition and Programs

Dan Borelli: Chasing Color Exhibition
February 21-April 1, 2019
Opening: Thursday, Feb 21 from 4 to 6:30pm; Artist talk at 5pm

CVPA Campus Gallery, College of Visual and Performing Arts
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth/285 Old Westport Rd., Dartmouth MA 02747
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 http://groundedvisionaries.org/gsd_news/dan-borelli/.


Dan Borelli, The Ashland-Nyanza Project: Illuminating Futures, 2016.