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Monstrous: Whaling and Its Colossal Impact

Monstrous

Whaling and Its Colossal Impact

Opening May 24, 2025

Collins Gallery, Thompson Exhibition Building

Step into the world of 19th-century American whaling with Monstrous: Whaling and Its Colossal Impact, a powerful new exhibition that explores the sheer scale—physical, economic, and human—of the nation’s whaling industry and its legacy. 

Explore hundreds of striking artifacts from the Museum’s renowned whaling collections—tools, old photographs, ship models, documents, and more—most of which have never been exhibited together before. Hefty iron trypots, harpoons, darting guns, and blubber hooks tell the story of the extraordinary lengths commercial whalers went to harvest oil-rich blubber and spermaceti. These items speak to the staggering risks and resource demands of an industry that lit America’s lamps and greased its machines for over a century. 

Through vivid paintings, lithographs, and rare historic photographs, Monstrous brings to life the perilous activities involved in chasing, capturing, and processing whales—many of these scenes taken from our Robert Cushman Murphy and H. S. Hutchinson & Co. photography collections. Visitors will come face-to-face with images of whalers “cutting in” and “trying out” aboard floating factories, viewed alongside the very tools used in the hunt. 

At the forefront of the exhibition is Or, The Whale, a monumental 51-foot mural by artist Jos Sances. Shaped like a life-sized sperm whale and created from 119 intricately inscribed scratchboard panels, the mural immerses viewers in a visual journey through three centuries of American industrialism. Influenced by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Rockwell Kent’s iconic illustrations, Sances’s work weaves together scenes of industry, innovation, and ecological transformation. Visitors can dive deeper into the mural through an artist video and interactive digital experience powered by ThingLink. 

The exhibition also features exquisite consumer goods made from whale byproducts—items of both beauty and utility. See ornate examples of scrimshaw, including knitting needles, corset busks, boxes, and a rare scrimshaw lathe and bandsaw. These artifacts underscore how deeply whale oil and materials were embedded in 19th-century daily life. 

Monstrous goes beyond tools and trade to tell personal stories of the people behind the industry. Discover the lives of multicultural whaling crews, including Cape Verdean whalers like Antoine DeSant, who settled in New London in 1860. Learn about women who defied conventions by joining whaling voyages not only as wives and mothers but also as navigators, nurses, and log keepers. One remarkable figure, Charlotte “Lottie” Church, signed on as an assistant navigator in 1909 and was the last woman to sail aboard the Charles W. Morgan during its whaling career. 

Two extraordinary whaling logs offer deeper insight into life at sea—one from the bark Ohio (1875–78) complete with whale stamps, and another handmade in 1821 from burlap and sailcloth by a Cape Verdean whaler. These documents, along with models of whaling ships and samples of commercial whale oil, offer a comprehensive and moving look at an industry that helped shape our region and nation. 

Don’t miss the chance to experience this bold and thought-provoking exhibition that blends art, history, and storytelling to explore whaling’s monstrous impact on the world—and the people—who built it. 

Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea

ENTWINED

Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea

Now on Exhibit

April 20, 2024, through April 19, 2026

Stillman Building

Curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes, PhD

Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea is a new major exhibition centering maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African-descended worldviews and experiences. Unraveling the threads of existing maritime narratives for the history of the Dawnland (New England), Indigenous dispossession, and racialized slavery, this exhibition is rooted in voices and histories that have been silent or silenced. 

Kuhtah and Kalunga are the Pequot and Bantu words for the Atlantic Ocean. Kuhtah/Kalunga and its tributaries—with its cycles of ebb and flow, push and pull, and trauma and healing—forever connect the histories, cultures, peoples, and legacies of ancestral African societies and kingdoms to the Sovereign Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island, or North America. Like waterways, contact between Africans and the Indigenous Nations of the Dawnland attests to the power of African and Indigenous ancestors, the circularity of time, and fundamental cycles of death and rebirth. 

Entwined explores the enduring legacies, strength, and resilience of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and African-descended peoples of the Dawnland. Foregrounding ancestral and descendant voices, Entwined re-weaves a narrative of African and Indigenous maritime cultures whose histories are forever interwoven in the stories of freedom, sovereignty, and the sea.

Acknowledgments 

Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea is generously funded by the Just Futures Initiative of the Mellon Foundation as part of the Reimagining New England Histories project. 

Mystic Seaport Museum also gratefully acknowledges our project partners, Brown University and Williams College, our community advisors whose collective voices, knowledge, creativity, and wisdom are foregrounded in this exhibition, and the artists whose pieces are on display in the exhibition: Alison Wells, Felandus Thames, Nafis M. White, Christian Gonçalves, Elizabeth James Perry, Robin Spears, Sierra Henries, and Sherenté Harris.

A special thanks to the exhibition committee members.

2021-2022 

Richard “Soaring Bear ” Cowes, Brad Lopes, Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed, Heather Bruegl, Jason Mancini, Leah Hopkins, Lorén Spears, Cheryll Holley, Nikki Turpin, Debbie Khadroui 

2022-2023 

Brad Lopes, Lorén Spears, Pilar Jefferson, Cheryll Holley, Leah Hopkins, Jason Mancini, Penny Gamble-Williams, Doreen Wade, Anika Lopes 

Exhibit design and fabrication by SmokeSygnals.

Sea As Muse

SEA AS MUSE

Now on Exhibit

September 18, 2021, through July 27, 2025

R. J. Schaefer Building

Where do artists find their inspiration? In ancient Greece, the Muses were supernatural beings who inspired artists, scholars, and writers to create their works. The upcoming exhibit, Sea as Muse, explores the ways that the sea provided a similar inspiration for decorative arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Opening in September 2021, the exhibit showcases fine silver trophies and woodcarvings from the vast collections of Mystic Seaport Museum. Dolphins and mermaids, seaweed and sea urchins, fast ships and ocean waves—visitors will find many delightful details like these, inspired by sea life and life on the seas. 

Silversmithing tools and in-progress pieces loaned by the Providence Jewelry Museum help demonstrate the making process, and interviews with living artisans shed light on both the process and the preparation necessary. New research provides a rare glimpse of some of the immigrant artists and artisans of the past who used their talent and skill to create a variety of beautiful objects in the exhibit. Offering visitors new ways of seeing and understanding American and British decorative arts, Sea as Muse also demystifies the visual languages of artistic expression.

Sea as Muse is the fourth and final exhibit funded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Like Open OceanSailor Made, and the 2020 reinstallation of ships’ figureheads, Sea as Muse brings new knowledge, insight, and perspective to treasures in Mystic Seaport Museum’s collections.

Figureheads and Shipcarvings

FIGUREHEADS AND SHIPCARVINGS

Now on Exhibit

Open Year-round

Wendell Building

After more than 40 years, the Museum’s figureheads exhibit received a makeover. Through a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, curators Katherine Hijar and Mirelle Luecke re-imagined this visitor favorite with a major new exhibit, Figureheads & Shipcarvings.

Since ancient times and across cultures, decorations have adorned the bows of boats and ships, from the Nile and the Mediterranean to the far North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Dutch and English ships of the 19th century were the first to sport figureheads like the ones we know today. Lions and unicorns were particular favorites of the English navy, and Dutch naval ships featured red lions. Spanish ships mounted figureheads depicting saints, no doubt to ensure blessings and safe passage. By the 18th century, European shipcarvers crafted figureheads that depicted a wide array of subjects, human and animal. The decline of figureheads came with the advent of steam power in the late 19th century, which influenced changes in the design of oceangoing ships. Since steam-powered ships no longer required rigging for sails, ships’ bows no longer provided a natural place for a figurehead to be mounted.

The new exhibit showcases the depth and breadth of the Museum’s carving collections. In addition to figureheads, it features other 19th-century ship carvings, shop figures, and our latest acquisition, a magnificent carousel hippocampus. The exhibit showcases only a fraction of the Museum’s collection. Because of space limitations, 45 figureheads and dozens of other maritime carvings will remain in the Museum’s vaults.

Ship’s figureheads were an important form of public art in the 19th century. A figurehead gave a ship its personality, and each one expressed a unique meaning, imbued with values and reflecting popular culture of the time. This reinterpretation aims to help visitors see these objects through 19th-century eyes, and to understand and appreciate the craft of carving and figureheads as an important art form.

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