Whaling Museum celebrates centennial
The New Bedford Whaling Museum is the world's leading interpreter of the global whaling story. The Museum relates this story on a broad canvas, tracing the triumphs and tragedies of the whaling trade when it was one of America's major industries and New Bedford was the world's leading whaling port.

Soon after its founding in 1903, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society established the New Bedford Whaling Museum, recognizing the vital role that whaling played in the community. For a century it has been a respected institution that preserved and presented the legacy of New England-based whaling in the age of sail.

A recent major expansion of the Museum and its research center is making it possible to exhibit and house the most comprehensive collection of artifacts encompassing seven centuries of American and worldwide nautical art, history, and culture. As the world's pre-eminent whaling institution, the Museum invites visitors to reflect on the complex issues -- past and present -- that the whaling story reveals.

In 2003 the Museum celebrates its centennial with new, interactive exhibitions, an expanded array of programs and collaborations, increased research opportunities, and state-of-the-art facilities. As the cultural keystone of the SouthCoast of Massachusetts and the anchor institution of the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, the Museum is an important resource for understanding the profound influence of the whaling industry on the region, the nation, and the world.

Opening May 25, the New Bedford Whaling Museum presents William Bradford: Sailing Ships and Arctic Seas, a major retrospective exhibition. A New Bedford native, Bradford is regaining the reputation he once enjoyed, not only as an accomplished marine painter, but also as the artist-explorer of the polar world. Today he is increasingly linked with fellow townsman Albert Bierstadt and with Frederic E. Church as creators of a national vision of the Continent's remote frontiers.

The exhibition highlights Bradford's contributions to American art by assembling a selection of his finest work. Featured items include paintings, drawn from all phases of his career, as well as 10 of his little-known plein-air sketches, and a selection of drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photographs.

Bradford's work has considerable range, including portraits of clippers and whalers, lively scenes of small craft at work and yachts at play, glowing harbor scenes of the country's busiest ports, more tranquil views of small villages nestled in northern bays, and the Arctic itself with fields of ice seen under the light of the midnight sun and enormous icebergs glowing with fire in radiant sunsets.

The exhibition has elicited the considerable interest of other organizations. Among lenders to the show are such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Library of Congress; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian National Museum of American Art; in addition to many respected private collectors.
Richard C. Kugler, director emeritus of the Museum and a recognized authority on Bradford, is guest curator. The exhibition is sponsored, in part, by grants from the National Endowment of Humanities and Sovereign Bank.