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?

Artist Susan Heideman (b. 1950) has explored bio-morphic shapes of the ocean’s “in-between entities” for nearly twenty years in her Proteanna series and beyond. The real and imagined floating, aqueous shapes of her work evoke the forms of invertebrate creatures that often remind us of primordial beings living in the depths of the sea.

What is a book? In its simplest form, it is a repository of words, images, information, or ideas but how can a book be reinterpreted or altered and still be a book? Where is “art” in bookmaking? How do design, structure, and materiality relate to the book as art?

Providence based artist May Babcock (b. 1986) is an eco-centric artist that creates paper works and sculptural forms from natural materials she sources from local environments. In her most recent body of work, on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in November of 2026, she creates a collection of “new ecologies” constructed from natural sites around southern New England.

Examine Bradford’s artwork alongside contemporary art on climate change and Eastern Arctic lifeways

A community workshop series and exhibition celebrating Guatemalan storytelling and experience