Past Exhibitions
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This exhibition will display selections from the NBWM’s collection of artwork related to Herman Melville and Moby-Dick, especially drawing on the Elizabeth Schultz and Melville Society Cultural Project Collection.
Since 2023, the New Bedford Whaling Museum has worked with interdisciplinary artist Katy Rodden Walker on a project and exhibition titled “Community BLOOMS,” a community focused art and science project exploring the increase in jellyfish blooms in the ocean due to warming waters. This participatory project invites visitors to create, consider, and collaborate around ideas of environmental change and activism.
The collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum / Old Dartmouth Historical Society are an impressive array of fine art, ethnographic objects, whaling implements, nautical artifacts, textiles, household items, and detailed documents from around the world.
Complicated Legacies: Museum History, White Supremacy, and Sculpture
October 11, 2024
October 13, 2025
This exhibition asks, what do we do with a bust created by someone who held deeply problematic racist ideologies? Do an artist’s beliefs impact how we interpret a sculpture? Is a sculpture like this one defined by the politics of the maker, patron, or subject? What were the Bourne’s politics, and what made Emily decide to commission the bust from Borglum in 1916?
Women have shaped the South Coast of Massachusetts and its histories. This exhibition connects items in the collection made by and for regional women to historical figures, organizations, events, and achievements – big and small.
Courtney M. Leonard’s BREACH project is an ongoing exploration of the historical and contemporary ties between place, community, whales, and the maritime environment. The various iterations of the project, created for individual institutions and settings, investigate the multiple definitions of the term “breach.”
The Wider World & Scrimshaw takes the Museum’s scrimshaw collection (objects carved by whalers on the byproducts of marine mammals) and places it in conversation with carved decorative arts and material culture made by Indigenous community members from across the Pacific and Arctic.
Reflections is an exhibition that asks viewers to reflect on water’s role in labor and leisure. Photographs in the exhibition will provoke questions about how and when we take time to reflect, and the water’s particular ability to hush or heighten one’s internal state.
Framing the Domestic Sea: photographs by Jeffery C. Becton presents a new body of work by this celebrated Maine artist.
In 2025, communities across the world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cape Verdean independence from Portugal. New Bedford and the greater South Coast area of New England are home to one of the largest and longest-standing Cape Verdean communities outside of Cabo Verde. In marking this occasion, the New Bedford Whaling Museum presents the Contemporary Cape Verdean 2025 project, which explores the Cape Verdean American and Cape Verdean experience through the lens of contemporary art and community storytelling.
Perri Lynch Howard is a multi-media artist based in Washington state and interested in environments at the forefront of climate change. Self-described as a “sound artist interested in quiet,” Howard has travelled the world recording sounds in the environment both above ground and underwater investigating ideas around sound and quiet, working to chart and capture sites at the forefront of extreme environmental change.
Organized by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Common Ground: Community Stories is an ambitious oral history project and exhibition to create a full picture of the Greater New Bedford region and residents through story collection. A key goal is to give voice to community members. By gathering individual stories, Common Ground presents a diverse, inclusive, and celebratory accounting of the lived experiences of South Coast residents.
5th Annual IGNITE: Youth Showcase of Art Inspired by Historic Women of the SouthCoast
March 7, 2023
March 26, 2023
For the fifth year in a row, young artists in grades 4 through 12 are being invited to create original artworks inspired by Lighting the Way: Historic Women of the SouthCoast. This year, youth are encouraged to highlight the accomplishments and stories of women of color featured on the Lighting the Way website.
Massachusetts artist Daniel Ranalli has been fascinated by the subject of whale strandings since he observed one first hand in 1991 at Wellfleet. As Ranalli explains: “My research into the history of such strandings uncovered a historical record of strandings in both the U.S. and abroad.” For Cape Cod, the history can be traced back to the early 1600s, and certain areas – the Outer Cape in particular, has a very high incidence of strandings and “drivings” (when whales were driven ashore intentionally).
In the world of oceanography, marine heatwaves are a recently “discovered” phenomenon. As NOAA explains, “Marine heatwaves are periods of persistent anomalously warm ocean temperatures, which can have significant impacts on marine life as well as coastal communities and economies.” They are becoming more intense and more frequent.
Steeped in the histories of global whaling and deeply tied to the objects in the Museum collection, Pettit and Corby poetically engage with Museum artworks, objects, and archives. The two forge tangible connections between past and present through processes of making and adaptation, in order to underscore the global interconnectedness of people and things.
Much like the space of the shoreline itself, which is never a fixed point but always moving, shifting, and changing depending on the tide, seaweed is uniquely invigorated by its marine environment and always changing — both in form and appearance and in its cultural and social meanings and uses.
Museum Curator of Maritime History, Michael P. Dyer explores the deep cultural connections between American whaling and the U.S. Navy in the 19th century up to the First World War.
The Stars that Guide Us created by New Bedford-based contemporary artist Roy Rossow, represents a significant creative endeavor and the generation of two interrelated but uniquely distinctive bodies of painted work.
