Transcript
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Geoff Bennett: Scrimshaw is a traditional 19th century art form that is now viewed in a much broader context and from a contemporary perspective. That is the aim of an exhibition that challenges some old assumptions about the process and the product itself.
Jeffrey Brown visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts to research our arts and culture series “Canvas.”
It is a story of contact, impact, connections, great adventures and great loss, of people and animals across two oceans over around 100 years. In the exhibition entitled “The Wider World and Scrimshaw”, the story is told through objects.
Chief Curator Naomi Slipp.
Naomi Slipp, chief curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum: “There are records of individual experiences and what these people were doing. Whether they were staying in communities that were regularly visited by whalers or whether they were whalers themselves on board a ship, they all had these extraordinary experiences.
Jeffrey Brown: The romance of sea adventures and the fascination with whales are part of the experience here. Visitors are greeted by a 3.6-ton skeleton of a young blue whale.
But in a gallery next door, a special exhibition offers a very different insight. Scrimshaw is the traditional art form of carving or engraving the bones, teeth and ivory of marine mammals, typically whales and walruses. It is most commonly associated with 19th century whaling, an industry that was long based here in New Bedford – think Herman Melville and “Moby-Dick.”
The Whaling Museum, located in a port town with a working harbor, houses the world’s largest collection of scrimshaw, but for this exhibition the aim was to place these objects in a larger context, alongside a wide range of works by the indigenous peoples with whom whalers regularly came into contact throughout the Pacific.
Slipp points to this small corset cord. Corset cords were a staple of women’s fashion in the 19th century. They were used to stiffen corsets and were usually made of whale bone. However, this corset cord had an unusual pattern engraved into it.
Naomi Slipp: We looked at it and thought, “Oh my God, that’s a nautical chart.” It’s a nautical chart, traditionally used in parts of the Pacific to know the patterns of swell and currents and how to move from island to island.
Jeffrey Brown: So not from the Yankee whalers, but from the people they came into contact with.
Naomi Slipp: Exactly, with the Pacific Islanders. And the idea that someone who was on a whaling ship and made a busk, a typical New England shape for a corset, would also inscribe it with something that would have been really culturally significant to the Pacific Islanders was quite appealing.
Jeffrey Brown: Scientists have long studied this clash of cultures and its often negative political, environmental and other consequences.
This exhibition, says Slipp, attempts to build on research and establish artistic references to the present.
Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss, artist: People talk about a lost art form, but I like to think of it as having been sleeping and I have brought it to life through my work.
Jeffrey Brown: New Zealand artist Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss is part Maori and part Niue, with Niue being a small island about 2,400 kilometers to the northeast.
Eight years ago, she began the traditional art of making tapa barkcloth paintings, called hiapo, in Niue, where she says the practice has almost died out. It was rare for her to even see older hiapo, she says, and then she got an email with a photo from the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which owned this well-preserved work, which had been brought back on a Yankee whaling ship.
Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss: I was confused too because I asked myself: What is this doing in New Bedford? What is this doing so far from home?
And it’s in good condition and the ink itself is absolutely bright and vibrant, like the day it was made. And then of course there’s a ship in one of the patterns, and that also tells of the colonial history of Niue and really situates it in that time.
Jeffrey Brown: The museum commissioned her to create a new work, a kind of dialogue with the old, with her own images and patterns of the sea and its wildlife.
Cora-Allan believes she is the first person to practice it in over a hundred years and says it was her grandparents who first encouraged her to do it.
Why was it important for you to do this, to take on this role?
Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss: It is important to me because I was asked.
Jeffrey Brown: From them?
Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss: They asked me. They asked me and worked six days a week. My nanny worked until she was 70. Why shouldn’t I take on the responsibility? Because it’s so important that my culture is shared, but they couldn’t continue these practices and that’s why it’s important because they asked me and I’m a granddaughter of the Moana of the Pacific.
Jeffrey Brown: Another contemporary artist updating and adding urgency to 19th-century history is Courtney M. Leonard of the Shinnecock Indian Tribe of eastern Long Island, New York.
Her work at the museum is part of an ongoing project called “Breach,” which explores little-told stories from the past, including those of members of her tribe who sailed on whaling ships. Her scrimshaw studies, as she calls them, are made of ceramics, and the ruptures she addresses are moral, legal, land tenure and environmental issues, including today’s rising sea levels.
Courtney M. Leonard, artist: You grow up with water and understand your relationship to a place and your responsibility to it. Whether you make that your life’s work is up to you, but for some, at least for me living at home, there are indeed rising water levels.
So when you live in a place where the water is rising, you realize that time is valuable in many ways.
Jeffrey Brown: As the exhibition today shows, marine mammals such as whales and walruses are protected by law and the trade in whale and walrus bones and ivory, including scrimshaw, is strictly regulated.
Still, it can be unsettling to see these objects made from the bones and teeth of some of the Earth’s most magnificent creatures. I asked chief curator Naomi Slipp how she feels about it.
Naomi Slipp: That’s a difficult thing. I mean, when you really think about what’s around us here, you see an enormous amount of death, which is kind of overwhelming sometimes when you really grapple with it, the number of whales and walruses and other species that are represented by these materials.
But I hope that people will ultimately take away some sense of survival and survival, of tradition, craftsmanship, community and of the whales themselves.
“Jeffrey Brown: The Wider World and Scrimshaw” runs until November 11th.
For the PBS News Hour, I’m Jeffrey Brown at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.
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