​​Local Ecologies is an innovative multimedia exploration of the diverse coastal and river ecosystems 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 through strategies for reading the ground with greater care. By recognizing entangled histories and working within difficult inheritances, this 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. In expanded forms, the book’s contributors reflect on sites such as Jerry’s Pond in Cambridge, Deer Island in Boston Harbor, New Bedford Harbor, and the Merrimack River, tracing histories of colonialism and displacement, and presenting contemporary acts of resistance and 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.

Kirsten Swenson is associate professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is the author of Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York (Yale University Press, 2015) and, with Emily Eliza Scott, co-editor and author of the volume Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (University of California Press, 2015). 

Rebecca Uchill is director of the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Uchill earned her PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at MIT, where she later served as visiting faculty and postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Art, Science, and Technology. She has held curatorial positions at institutions including Mass MoCA, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. 

Part I: On This Ground
 
Chapter 1 In the Absence of Cultural Reflections: Looking for a Landscape
Chapter 2 Not Neutral Ground: Creative Landscapes of Eastern Massachusetts
 
Part II: Local Ecologies
 
Chapter 3 Introduction: Local Ecologies
Chapter 4 Ecologies of Acknowledgment
Chapter 5 Botanies of Migration
Chapter 6 Ground Truthing 
Chapter 7 Life of the Merrimack
Chapter 8 Coda: Dear Readers