Upcoming Exhibitions

Gift of the Whale: The Inupiat Bowhead Hunt, A Sacred Tradition
Peter Foulger Gallery in the Whaling Museum, March 26 – June 13, 2010

The Iñupiat Eskimos have lived and hunted in the Arctic region of Alaska for 5,000 years. Central to their lifestyle and survival is the bowhead whale, a primary source not only of food, building materials, and barter goods, but also of art, legends, and cultural identity. The Iñupiat communities continue to pursue the bowhead in their annual hunt. They conduct the whale hunt under the strict supervision of federal and state agencies, and secure between 60–80 whale in their annual season (the International Whaling Commission has allotted the Iñupiat a block quota of 280 bowhead whales from 2008–2012.)

The exhibition features the photography of Bill Hess, who documented the bowhead hunt in his book Gift of the Whale: The Iñupiat Bowhead Hunt, A Sacred Tradition. With patience and openness, Hess earned the trust of the Iñupiat community, and was invited to document the hunt. His photographs share a startling and deeply moving portrait of a community fully engaged in the pursuit of the bowhead whale. The exhibition will provide visitors with a glimpse into a contemporary society that owes its survival to the hunting of whales, not unlike the island of Nantucket at the height of the Golden Age of whaling.

The exhibition will include: Photographs by Bill Hess; the documentary film The Eskimo and The Whale; an Eskimo kayak and Arctic carvings in ivory from the NHA collections; the building of a traditional Umiak by wooden boatbuilder Corey Freedman; Iñupiat music; speakers/presenters Bill Hess, Robert Hellman, Bill Tramposch, Ben Simons, and an Iñupiat whaling captain; possible video exchange with Barrow, Alaska and Nantucket school children.

A Passion for People: 40 Years of Nantucket Portrait Photography by Beverly Hall
Whitney Gallery in the Research Library, April 22 – December 31, 2010

A Passion for People will showcase photographer Beverly Hall’s outstanding eye for portraiture through four decades of Nantucket history. The retrospective will open a window into the remarkable changes that have occurred on Nantucket in the last four decades, and the evolution and resilience of the individuals and families who have lived through those times. To present the full scope of Hall’s work, the exhibition will feature several hundred images on multiple presentation screens in addition to traditionally framed images. Organized by categories, the screens will allow visitors to enjoy individual topics, such as “Characters,” presenting her remarkable images of Madaket Millie and Mr. Rogers, or “Artists,” highlighting the gallery scene on South Wharf in the 1970s and beyond. Hall’s work captures an important chapter in Nantucket’s postwar history, a time which it is increasingly important to record and showcase as part of Nantucket’s modern history. The exhibition will be accompanied by a Brown Bag lecture by Beverly Hall; and a series of gallery talks by the artist.

“Sometime think of me”: Notable Nantucket Women through the Centuries
Embroidered Narratives by Susan Boardman with biographies by Betsy Tyler
Peter Foulger Gallery, Whaling Museum, July 1 – November 8, 2010

The major 2010 exhibition in the Peter Foulger Gallery of the Nantucket Whaling Museum will be “Sometime think of me”: Notable Nantucket Women Through the Centuries. The exhibition focuses on the colorful lives and histories of outstanding women from four centuries of Nantucket history. It will be the NHA’s first large-scale exhibition exploring the history of the island’s remarkable women. Such fascinating individuals as Wampanoag maiden Wonoma, whaling wife and journal keeper Eliza Brock, whaling wife and journal illustrator Susan Veeder, scientist Maria Mitchell, abolitionist Eunice Ross, and many contemporary Nantucket women, will be presented in lively detail using the NHA’s rich collections of artifacts, logbooks, and manuscript material. “Sometime think of me,” reminds us to recall and explore Nantucket’s less familiar, but no less remarkable lives—the lives of the island’s representative women.

“Sometime think of me”: Notable Nantucket Women through the Centuries will feature thirty-two individuals whose lives are the subjects of “embroidered narratives” by Nantucket needlework artist Susan Boardman. In the great tradition of historic Nantucket schoolgirl samplers, as well as the legacy of whaling illustrations in logbooks and journals, Boardman’s embroidered narratives have grown to encompass a history-in-brief of the women of Nantucket from the earliest Native American period to contemporary times. Her work covers the lives of some of the most exemplary Nantucket women, whose spirit of independence, resourcefulness, and ambition, often in the face of their husbands’ long absences at sea, have made them much admired in American history. Astronomer Maria Mitchell said of her island sisters, “There is no town in New England where the whole body of women is so well-educated.”

A major feature of the exhibition will be an accompanying book-length catalog, written by island historian and NHA Research Fellow Betsy Tyler. The catalog will fill a major gap in the Nantucket literature as an accessible, thoroughly-researched history of a broad range of outstanding island women, past and present.

Other features of the exhibition and related programming will include voice-over readings of selected passages from the journals, logs, and letters of the women featured in the exhibition presented with still images on the Foulger projections screen; a lecture by Betsy Tyler presenting the history of the women in the show (summer); the Friends of the NHA lecturer be Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife.