Here’s what a group of Mass. women want to do before they die
A blank chalkboard provokes a wide array of responses.
What do you want to do before you die?
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More than 10,000 women who attended the Mass Conference for Women on Thursday faced that question in the form of a chalkboard-covered wall that loomed inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
Though a blank wall asking such a question may be intimidating, it filled up quickly with everything from the broad (“Live’’) to the specific (“I want my girls to know how much I love them’’).
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Candy Chang designed the wall, and spoke at the Mass Women conference about how it came to be. She wasn’t new to creating these sorts of public art pieces — on a dilapidated, empty building in her hometown of New Orleans, she pasted a grid of blank stickers that read, “I wish this was…’’
The community filled in ideas “from the functional to the poetic,’’ Chang said on Thursday, and inspired her creation Neighborhoodland, which allows all the voices of a neighborhood to be heard, fostering connections and collaborations for various business adventures.
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The more intimate and existential “Before I Die’’ wall was spawned out of a period of grief and depression for Chang. She turned to her own home of New Orleans again for an outlet, and painted the side of an abandoned house with prompts for her community to fill in their own bucket lists. The day after the wall went up, it was completely covered in chalk-written aspirations.
“It was this big honest mess of longing, pain, joy, insecurity, fear, and wonder that you find in every community,’’ Chang said.
On the wall inside the BCEC, people wrote that they wanted to run a marathon, start their own business, and help autistic kids. One entry read “Buy my mom a house,’’ right above another that said “Meet my grandkids.’’ Someone wants to know love and another to find a best friend.
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There are now more than 1,000 walls in over 70 countries — and much like that first experiment, this wall in Boston was completely covered by the end of the conference.
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