Appreciate [The Ville]

Brianna Leatherbury connects their interests in urban planning, economics, and industrial systems to soil health and financial valuations. Appreciate consists of sculptures half-buried in the soil in two empty lots: one in The Ville, a historically Black neighborhood, and another along the Mississippi Riverfront, a site increasingly defined by incoming development. The sculptures are made with phosphate reclaimed from St. Louis wastewater and rammed earth, a sustainable building technique that involves compressing soil, chalk, and clay. Located on land with high lead content, the phosphate in the sculpture interacts with the lead, causing a chemical reaction to pull lead out of the soil. Over time, this process produces pyromorphite, a green crystalline mineral that makes remediation visible in real time. 

The soil around the sculpture will undergo periodic testing by Clean STL to measure the amount of lead being removed. The phosphate is made by Ostara, a local agricultural technology company.

This project is presented with support from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Frankenthaler Climate Initiative and The Hearthland Foundation.