New exhibit explores 19th-century bone and ivory art

GEOFF BENNETT: Scrimshaw is a traditional 19th century art form now seen through a much wider context and a contemporary lens.

That's the goal of an exhibit which challenges some old assumptions about the process and the product itself.

Jeffrey Brown went to the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts to look for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

It's a story of contact, impact, connections, great adventure and great loss, humans and animals across two oceans over some 100 years.

In the exhibition titled The Wider World and Scrimshaw, the story is told through objects.

Chief curator Naomi Slipp.

NAOMI SLIPP, Chief Curator, New Bedford Whaling Museum: There are records of individual experiences and what those individuals were doing, whether they were in communities that were regular ports of call for whalers or whether they were whalers on shipboard themselves, they were having these extraordinary experiences.

JEFFREY BROWN: The romance of sea adventures, the fascination with whales themselves, it's part of the experience here.

Visitors are greeted by an 8,000-pound juvenile blue whale skeleton.

But, in a gallery next door, a special exhibit offers a different kind of window.

Scrimshaw is the traditional art form of carving or engraving on the bones, teeth and ivory of marine mammals, typically whales and walruses.

It's most associated with 19th century whaling, an industry long centered, think Herman Melville and "Moby-Dick, here in New Bedford.

The whaling museum in what's still a port city with a working harbor houses the world's largest scrimshaw collection.

But, for this exhibition, it wanted to set those objects in a larger context or conversation among a wide range of works by the indigenous peoples with whom whalers came into regular contact throughout the Pacific.

Slipp points to this small busk.

Busks were a regular part of women's fashion in the 19th century, used to stiffen corsets and typically made from whale bone.

But this one had an unusual pattern engraved into it.

NAOMI SLIPP: And we looked at it and thought, oh, my goodness, it's a navigation chart.

It's a navigation chart that's used traditionally in parts of the Pacific to learn the patterns of swells and currents to move from island to island.

JEFFREY BROWN: So not by the Yankee whalers, but by the people they were connecting with.

NAOMI SLIPP: Exactly, with Pacific Islanders.

And so the idea that someone who was on a whaling vessel, who was creating a busk, which is a very New England form for a corset, was also inscribing it with something that would have been really culturally significant for Pacific Islanders was quite tantalizing.

JEFFREY BROWN: Scholars have long studied this collision of cultures, as well as the often negative political, environmental and other consequences.

This exhibition, Slipp says, tries to tie into the research and make artistic connections to today.

CORA-ALLAN LAFAIKI TWISS, Artist: It's been spoken as a lost art form, but I like to think of it as it's been sleeping, and I have just -- my practice has wakened it up.

JEFFREY BROWN: Artist Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss from New Zealand is part Maori, part Niue, the latter a small island some 1,500 miles to the Northeast.

Eight years ago, she took up the traditional art of making tapa bark cloth paintings called hiapo in Niue, where she says the practice is all but gone.

It's been rare for her to even see older hiapo, she says, and then she got an e-mail with a photo from the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which owned this well-preserved work brought back on a Yankee whaler.

CORA-ALLAN LAFAIKI TWISS: I was also confused, because I'm like, what is this doing in New Bedford?

What's it doing so far away from home?

And it's in good condition and the ink itself is absolutely bright and vibrant like the day it would have been made.

And then there's, of course, a ship inside one of the patterns, and so that also talks about that colonial history that Niue have and really placing this in that time period.

JEFFREY BROWN: The museum commissioned her to create a new work, a kind of conversation with the old, with her own imagery and patterns of the sea and its animal life.

Cora-Allan believes she's the first practitioner in more than a hundred years and says it was her grandparents who first asked her to take it up.

Why was it important for you to do, to take on?

CORA-ALLAN LAFAIKI TWISS: It's important to me because I was asked.

JEFFREY BROWN: By them?

CORA-ALLAN LAFAIKI TWISS: I was asked by them.

They asked me, and they worked six days a week.

My nanny worked until she was like 70.

Why wouldn't I take on the responsibility being asked?

Because it's so important that my culture is shared, but they weren't able to continue these practices, and so it's important because they asked me, and I'm a granddaughter from the Moana from the Pacific.

JEFFREY BROWN: Another contemporary artist updating and bringing urgency to the 19th century story, Courtney M. Leonard of the Shinnecock Indian Nation based on Eastern Long Island, New York.

Her work at the museum part of an ongoing project she titled Breach looks at past undertold stories, including members of her tribe who sailed on whaling ships.

Her scrimshaw studies, as she calls them, are made of ceramic and the breach she addresses is moral, legal, ownership of the land and environmental, including today sea rise.

COURTNEY M. LEONARD, Artist: You grow up with the water and you understand your relationship to place and your responsibility to place.

Whether one chooses to have that be their life's work is up to them, but, for some, at least for myself, living back home, we do have rising waters.

So when you're living in a place where the waters rise, you realize that time is of value in many different ways.

JEFFREY BROWN: As the exhibition shows today, marine mammals such as whales and walruses have legal protections and the trade in whale and walrus bone and ivory, including scrimshaw, is heavily regulated.

Still, it can be unsettling to experience these objects made of the bones and teeth of some of the Earth's most magnificent creatures.

I asked chief curator Naomi Slipp how she sees it.

NAOMI SLIPP: It's a hard thing.

I mean, I think if you really think about what we're surrounded by in here, there's an intense amount of death, which is sort of sometimes overwhelming if you really sit with it, the number of whales and walrus and other species that are represented by these materials.

But I hope that, ultimately, what people come away with is a sense of kind of survival and survivance, of tradition and of craft and of communities, of the whales themselves.

JEFFREY BROWN: The Wider World and Scrimshaw is on through November 11.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.