Borelli’s “Illuminating Futures” Awarded NEA Our Town Grant

The Arts Company is pleased to announce the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has awarded a $25,000 Our Town grant to Prospectus artist Dan Borelli’s Illuminating Futures: Ashland, Massachusetts project. This grant is in addition to the $75,000 awarded to Illuminating Futures by ArtPlace America a year ago, and completes the fundraising needed for Dan to fully realize his multiyear, cross-disciplinary, research-based, collaborative project, now scheduled to be completed in June 2016.

Illuminating Futures: Ashland, Massachusetts is a unique creative placemaking project in that it focuses on a community liability– the Nyanza Superfund site, the toxic contamination of area water and soil by the Nyanza Chemical Plant. The subject choice is deeply personal as Ashland is Dan’s hometown, and the Superfund site is directly responsible for contaminating his community. Friends of his contracted a rare, fatal form of cancer, and Nyanza was posthumously verified as the source.

The Illuminating Futures grant was one of 69 Our Town awards announced recently by NEA Chairman Jane Chu. The NEA received 275 applications this year for Our Town, which “supports creative placemaking projects that help to transform communities into lively, beautiful, and resilient places with the arts at their core.” Since the program’s inception in 2011 and including these projects, the NEA has awarded 325 Our Town grants totaling almost $26 million in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. The grant given to The Arts Company for Illuminating Futures is one of four given to organizations in Massachusetts.

The Arts Company, through Artists in Context, began working with Dan when his Ashland project was in thesis form at Harvard Graduate School of Design. His The Cloud of Unknowing, is part of the Artists’ Prospectus for the Nation, and The Arts Company is continuing to work with Dan on Illuminating Futures.