Past Exhibitions
Filter by Year
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.
Framing the Domestic Sea: photographs by Jeffery C. Becton presents a new body of work by this celebrated Maine artist.
At Our Sisters’ School (OSS), the sixth grade integrated humanities and arts unit “New Bedford in the 1800s” hinges on the essential questions: What was happening in the US and in New Bedford during the 1800s? How has history and the environment shaped our community? How does art connect to our world and beyond?
Art from this seminal twentieth century painter reflects Portuguese identity and culture, and honors the artist’s Azorean roots.
This exhibition demonstrates how the Underground Railroad enabled people to escape enslavement by sea prior to the Civil War.
As a resident of Southeastern, MA, Shattuck’s paintings reflect a fascination with the tidal marshes, estuaries and woodlands along our coastline.
Organized as a component of the NBWM exhibition and oral history initiative, Common Ground: Community Stories, “Close Relations” presents an intimate and photographically compelling look at life in the SouthCoast in the early 1970s.
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.
This exhibition showcases a cross-section of extraordinary artworks in order to reveal and explore humankind’s fascination with and relationship towards this vaunted and elusive species.
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?