Description
Summary: Mystic Seaport was founded in 1929 as The Marine Historical Association to preserve historical memory related to the nation’s maritime material culture. Re-named Mystic Seaport in 1973, it serves as the preeminent U.S. maritime museum and a leading research and education center. While Mystic Seaport’s mission has long focused on “inspiring an enduring connection to the American maritime experience,” it has more recently expanded its vision to include “redefining the interchange between maritime heritage and contemporary culture,” effectively moving the Seaport from a place of nostalgia to one of cross-disciplinary innovation.
The best-known features of the museum’s 19-acre campus, and the attractions that draw close to 250,000 annual visitors, are a recreated coastal village, a working preservation shipyard, and four National Historic Landmark vessels. The newest, transformative addition is the 14,000 sq. ft. Thompson Exhibition Center, a facility for major touring exhibitions that will underpin a strategic shift to a year-round operating model. Least known is the Seaport’s 41,000 sq. ft. Collections Research Center, which provides secure storage and access to approximately one million artworks and artifacts, a 75,000-volume research library, over one million photographs, 1.5 million feet of film and video, and one million manuscripts.
Mystic Seaport now seeks funding for a major, multi-faceted collection and curatorial training project catalyzed by a day-long think tank, funded jointly by the Luce and Chipstone Foundations, which brought eight prominent humanities scholars and Chipstone curators into dialogue with museum staff and trustees. The Seaport has proposed three collection installations for adjacent spaces in the Gallery Quadrangle. The overarching goal of the installations would be to reassert the artistic merit and educational potential of the Seaport’s remarkable collections of decorative, folk, and self-taught art, which have long been interpreted at Mystic solely in terms of maritime history. The project represents an extraordinary opportunity to present compelling installations of art objects to audiences who are perhaps less inclined to visit a traditional art museum.
The first project will be a year-long exhibition titled Between Speculation and the Sublime: The Ocean as Commons , to be curated by Mary Mattingly, a leading Contemporary artist who uses the sea as a platform for artmaking. Mattingly will comb the collections for objects that reference the idea of an ocean commons – a liberating but daunting global space outside of conventional governance. Selections may include paintings, prints, photographs, craft objects, or manuscripts that offer evidence of how the sea has always challenged the rigidity of terrestrial life and by its very nature has engaged distinctive creative responses.
The second installation, a semi-permanent exhibition titled Sailor-Creators and the Sea as Studio , will showcase and explore the objects from the Seaport’s extraordinary 1,400 object collection of scrimshaw. The installation will highlight ships as transient sites of creativity for a large and diverse population of self-taught artists. Sailors etched and pigmented whale teeth with a wide array of imagery, some rendered with notable sophistication. They also transformed marine ivory into ornamented canes, pie crimpers, yarn-winders, and inlaid boxes. The third installation, a semi-permanent exhibition titled Immigrant Craftsmen and the Sea as Muse will present works from the Seaport’s collection of approximately 500 silver yachting trophies, which are virtually unknown to the public and have never been formally researched. These Gilded Age works, previously studied as markers of high-stakes sport and social status, will be interpreted as aesthetic objects created by Central and Eastern Europe immigrants for companies including Tiffany and Gorham.
All aspects of the project will be led by Nicholas Bell, Mystic’s Senior Vice President for Curatorial Affairs. Grants funds would support virtually all costs associated with the installations, including Mattingly’s year-long tenure and the 18-month tenures of two rising curators who will execute the object selection, research, and interpretation for the second and third installations. The grant would also support two pre-professional inclusive internships that will offer an immersive museum experience, and three teacher-fellows who will adapt the interpretive materials into “resource sets” available for museum and classroom teachers.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $735,000 to the Mystic Seaport Museum for three collection-based installations.
