The Wider World & Scrimshaw

Maker once known, Busk, 1800s, pierced and laminated whale skeletal bone, cloth and metal, approx 5 x 15 cm, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Scrimshaw is the art of carving on marine mammal ivory primarily made by 19th-century whalers while at sea. The Wider World & Scrimshaw takes the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s scrimshaw collection and places it in conversation with carved decorative arts and material culture made by Indigenous community members from across the Pacific and Arctic. Native communities across Oceania, the Pacific, and Arctic have cosmologies related to whales, distinctive maritime traditions involving marine mammals, and vibrant carving styles. They were also impacted by commercial whaling ventures in the 1800s and the external pressures of colonialism and Western empire-building.

This interdisciplinary, community-driven, and collections-focused project engages questions about identity, place, and material, and considers how exploration and whaling impacted the production of material culture in this diverse region between 1700 and today. The exhibition showcases over three hundred objects, paying particular attention to ones that indicate cultural and material exchanges. How did whaling (internal or external) impact these different communities and their unique art forms – from New Bedford to Aotearoa to Utqiaġvik? In what ways do these legacies continue within contemporary art, communities, and cultures?

The exhibition considers different cultural products from Oceanic material culture and Arctic carvings to engraved sperm whale teeth, and explores issues related to trade, markets, taste, and patterns of popular consumption; assumptions about materials (coconut shells, whale teeth, walrus ivory, human hair), their circulation, and animal agency; differences between cultural and commercial value systems; disciplinary hierarchies related to craft traditions, folk-art, anthropology, and “fine” art; and gender roles, for making and consumption.

The exhibition website includes a range of resources including a full list of exhibits, videos about some of the communities whose work features in the exhibition, and teachers resources.