Local Ecologies: Artistic Investigations of Eastern Massachusetts is an innovative multimedia exploration of the entangled natural and cultural ecologies of Eastern Massachusetts. The book’s rich archive of essays, interviews, and artistic projects reveals the region’s layered Indigenous, colonial, and industrial histories, showing how art can deepen understanding of place. The volume foregrounds multiple ways of knowing and making place—through observation, research, memory, and collective action—offering the reader models for ongoing engagement with the region and beyond.
Developed through a multiyear collaboration among artists, scholars, activists, and community stakeholders, this volume takes its name from an initiative hosted by three University of Massachusetts campuses (Boston, Dartmouth, and Lowell) in 2019 and 2020. Through essays, videos, sound artworks, artist books, and other intermedia offerings, the book’s contributors reflect on sites such as Walden Pond, Deer Island in Boston Harbor, New Bedford Harbor, and the Merrimack River, tracing histories of use and interpretation of place, and exploring contemporary responses to those legacies through creative acts of reclamation. At a moment when the infrastructures of cultural memory are increasingly under threat, Local Ecologies insists on art as a vital mode of collective reckoning and possibility.