Anyone who has stood in an orange stream knows yellow boy, the iron oxide sludge that abandoned mine drainage leaves on every rock it touches. Artist Sally Veach is turning it into art, and the art into restoration money.
Veach’s Yellow Boy project creates drawings using ochre pigment extracted from AMD sludge, paired with coal as a drawing medium. Every dollar of sales goes to the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association. The exhibit runs through October 12 at the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading.
The project
Veach is a Virginia-based artist whose family leased land to coal companies in central Pennsylvania back in the 1800s. She extracts ochre pigment from AMD sludge and uses it to draw mayflies, stoneflies, and brook trout, the very creatures that mine drainage drives out of a stream. She has described the project as an “act of atonement” for her ancestors’ part in the industry’s legacy.
A model our basin could borrow
Moshannon Creek drains to the Susquehanna, not the Ohio, but the story lands squarely in our basin because the raw material does. The Upper Ohio’s coal country produces yellow boy by the ton, and several groups in our region already recover iron oxide from treatment systems for pigment. The idea of routing that material through artists, galleries, and gift shops, with proceeds flowing back to the treatment systems that produced it, is a fundraising model any AMD group could try.
Why it matters for the rest of us
It is also, frankly, good storytelling. A drawing of a brook trout made from the pollution that killed its stream says more about our work in one image than most grant reports manage in twenty pages. The Allegheny Front’s piece includes images of the work and an interview with Veach about the process.
Reporting from The Allegheny Front, August 27, 2026. Exhibit runs through October 12, 2026 at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, Reading, PA.
