Open Air 2025
June 5– October 6, 2025
Explore the eight new sculptures on view for Open Air 2025 as you stroll along the shoreline path. The exhibiting artists are Marsha Borden, Helena Chastel, Kathryn Frund, Phoebe Godfrey, Hugh MacDonald, Bob Pavlik, Dan Potter, and R. Douglass Rice. Open Air 2025 will remain on view through October 6, 2025.
Oceanic Melville
June 5 - June 19, 2025
Melville, like Ishmael, “swam through libraries and sailed through oceans” in pursuit of the whale. His shipmates, like those of Ishmael, came from all the “isles and ends of the earth.” The Moby-Dick artworks you see here are on loan from the Melville Society Archive and the Elizabeth Schultz Collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The artists who created them are from Greece, France, England, Canada, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and California.
In genre, medium, and style, these artworks are as varied as the chapters in Melville’s novel. They include paintings, watercolors, drawings, paper cuts, artist books and sculptures. They are executed in oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink, and pencil applied to canvas, paper, museum board, and wood through brushwork, etching, mezzotint, lithograph, screen print, or digital technique. These artworks oscillate, as Melville’s verbal aesthetic does, through all gradations from figurative to abstract.
The persons pictured in these artworks range in nautical occupation from cabin boy to common sailor, from cook to mate, from harpooneer to captain. They include sailors classified as White, Black, Native American, Asian, and Polynesian chasing whales classified as Sperm, Right, Black, Fin-Back, and Thrasher.
Melville, like Ishmael, wants us to embrace it all, to preserve sustainable lives among diverse creatures in the sea and on land in fluid harmony for the common good of “all the inmates of the place one lodges in.”
Gallery hours are Thursday-Sunday 12 -4 pm. There are extended hours to view the exhibition during the Melville conference on Monday June 16, and Tuesday June 17 also from 12-4pm.