2022 Exhibitions

Loomings: Christopher Volpe

December 11, 2021 – May 8, 2022

Braitmayer Galleries

Named after the first chapter of Moby-Dick, Loomings suggests disquieting parallels between our own oil-driven industrial age and Herman Melville’s apocalyptic vision of the American quest, as illustrated through the doomed commercial whaling voyage of the Pequod

Volpe renders his enigmatic marine imagery in tar, oil paint, and gold leaf. The tar, a fossil-fuel byproduct, functions as a monochromatic signifier of industrialism, particularly reckless over-extraction. Recalling that whale oil was the precursor to petroleum, the titles’ quotations from Moby-Dick, and the tar’s metallic blacks and tintype sepia tones invoke Melville’s novel as a cautionary, foundational myth for our own age of accelerating climate disruption and social unrest. The discovery of petroleum in 1856 marked the beginning of the end for the American whaling industry. But after 170 additional years of oil-driven industrialization, humanity continues to exploit nature without adequately understanding our place within it or even our own history.

Unvarnished: Conservation of Charles Sidney

Raleigh’s Panorama of a Whaling Voyage

December 12, 2021 – March 6, 2022

Wattles Family Gallery

Between 1878 and 1880, the prolific British-born painter Charles Sidney Raleigh undertook a daring artistic venture: a monumental panorama of twenty-two whaling scenes from the four-year voyage of the Niger, which departed from New Bedford in 1870 for the Pacific. The New Bedford Whaling Museum owns 18 of the Raleigh panorama panels, each measuring over six feet tall and 12 feet wide. Unvarnished, which featured eight of the paintings, aimed to underscore the challenges museums face in dealing with large collections and unusual objects. A second goal was to raise sufficient funds for the conservation of these paintings and preserve them for generations to come.

Turn the Tide: Courtney Mattison

November 15, 2021 – May 1, 2022

Herman Melville Room

Center Street Gallery

Donors: Anonymous, Christina M. Bascom, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Cutter Hardy, Island Foundation, KAM Appliances, Frances Levin, Tina & Paul Schmid, Frima G.* & Gilbert L. Shapiro

Los Angeles-based ceramicist and sculptor Courtney Mattison self-identifies as an artist and “ocean advocate.” Her delicate and monumental installations offer both visual interest and meaningful commentary on the health of our imperiled oceans. The delicacy of her porcelain forms, which appear to grow outward into organic spiraling shapes, and 6 then die before our eyes, bleaching into bone, poignantly illustrate the widespread and devastating effects of ocean warming and pollution on marine species, including corals and other invertebrates.

The Azorean Spirit: The Art of Domingos Rebêlo

March 31 – September 22, 2022

Wattles Family Gallery

Donors: Anonymous, The Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, Luso-American Development Foundation, Massachusetts State Senator Michael J. Rodrigues, The Senator Rodrigues Arts and Culture Fund of the SouthCoast Community Foundation, SATA-Azores Airlines, TAP Air Portugal.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, Domingos Rebêlo (1891-1975) created thousands of works of art that reflected his Portuguese identity and culture, and honored his Azorean roots. While he dreamed of exhibiting his works for Portuguese emigrant audiences abroad in the United States, he never had a show for American audiences during his lifetime. The Azorean Spirit: The Art of Domingos Rebêlo was the first international exhibition of this artist’s work presented in the United States Organized by his grandson and researcher, Jorge Rebêlo, the exhibition brought together more than fifty rarely seen paintings and works on paper from collections in continental Portugal and the Azores.

IGNITE: A Youth Showcase of Art Inspired by Historic Women of the Southcoast

April 22 – May 31, 2022

Upper Level Galleries

Young artists in grades 4 through 12 were invited to submit original artwork inspired by the Lighting the Way project. The resulting exhibition featured more than twenty paintings and drawing by youth from ten different schools, afterschool programs and homeschools. Their artworks reflect the diversity of both the historic women and the young people of today from our region. In the artworks, one can see the echoes of leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who shaped the SouthCoast as we know it today. In each, one sees the reflection of students’ passions and interests, as well as their artistry, attention to detail, craftsmanship, and individuality.

Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad

May 20 – November 20, 2022

Center Street Gallery

Donors: BayCoast Bank Foundation, Law Firm of Lang, Xifaras, and Bullard, New Bedford Historical Society, New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, Office of the Provost, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Southcoast Health Foundation

Self-emancipation along the Underground Railroad was not entirely by overland routes. Largely overlooked by historians is the great number of enslaved persons who made their way to freedom using coastal water routes along the Atlantic seaboard. Enslaved AfricanAmericans often escaped by sea aboard merchant and passenger ships, or using smaller watercraft. Sailing to Freedom highlighted the little-known stories and described the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad, including the impact of African-Americans’ paid and unpaid waterfront labor.

William Shattuck: Reveries

June 3, 2022 – January 1, 2023

Braitmayer Galleries

William Shattuck lives in Southeastern Massachusetts and his paintings reflect a fascination with the tidal marshes, estuaries and woodlands along that coastline. Having moved there in 1980 from New York, he has appreciated the changing patterns of light and weather throughout different seasons and times of day. This exhibition featured Shattuck’s evocative, moody landscape paintings. Shattuck employs careful brushwork and layered glazes to capture early morning light, haze on the marsh, or eerie glow of twilight on darkened tree trunks. His works evoke the attention to detail of the French Barbizon school, the impressionist studies of light and time by Claude Monet, and the luminescence of Maxfield Parrish.

Henry Horenstein: Close Relations

June 9 – December 18, 2022

Upper Level Galleries

Donors: Frances Levin, The William M. Wood Foundation

Organized as a component of the New Bedford Whaling Museum exhibition and oral history initiative, Common Ground: Community Stories, “Close Relations” presented an intimate and photographically compelling look at life in the SouthCoast in the early 1970s.

Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes

October 28, 2022 – May 14, 2023

Wattles Family Gallery

Donors: Anonymous (2), Mary Jean and William Blasdale, Cynthia & Douglas Crocker II, Victoria & David Croll, Sarah Jackson, KAM Appliances, Ann & D. Lloyd Macdonald, Louis Ricciardi & Elizabeth Soares, The William M. Wood Foundation

Program partners: Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, Sippican Lands Trust, Westport Land Conservation Trust

Nineteenth-century American artists are well known for their depictions of nature and the outdoors, for creating a national “school” of painting, and for their documentation and idealization of scenery ranging from the imagined and pastoral to the dramatic and sublime. This stunning exhibition was an exciting and timely invitation to view paintings held in private hands and usually hung behind closed doors – allowing exploration of the many meanings of the American landscape, both historically to nineteenth-century viewers and today for twenty-first century audiences.

Drawn from six exceptional regional private collections, the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection, and six loaning institutions, Re/Framing the View offered a layered interpretation of the cultural and historical meaning of such paintings. What such artists often failed to capture are the environmental conditions and social concerns, including those of women and Indigenous people, that may underlie picturesque imagery.

Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) and the Arctic Imaginary

December 12, 2022 – May 7, 2023

Center Street Gallery

The New Bedford Whaling Museum holds a deep collection of hundreds of original artworks, photographs, carvings, and material culture depicting or made from polar bears. This exhibition showcased a cross-section of these extraordinary artworks in order to reveal and explore humankind’s fascination and relationship with this vaunted and elusive species.

Moby-Dick in Days of Pestilence

and Chaos

December 22, 2022 – February 26, 2023

Upper Level Galleries

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and working through the 2020 lockdown, Boston-based artist Aileen Callahan (b. 1941) created Moby-Dick in Days of Pestilence and Chaos. This body of work explores themes of contagion and plague, and the known, the unseen, and the feared, as described by author Herman Melville (1819-1891) in the novel Moby-Dick (1851). How much time must pass before infection and chaos take hold —of a crew? —of a society? – and how do such questions apply to today?