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“Arctic Voices” opened at the New Bedford Art Museum on Nov. 14.
The new show features diverse artistic responses to the Arctic region from the 1870s through to the present and includes work by the 19th-century explorer and painter William Bradford (born in Fairhaven in 1820), his photographers George Critcherson and John L. Dunmore, Inuit and Indigenous artists, and contemporary creatives working in a broad range of media.
The Art Museum, with work on loan from the New Bedford Free Public Library, the New Bedford Museum of Glass, and the Look North Gallery (of Brooklyn, New York), has mounted an ambitious and thoughtful exhibition.
Executive Director and Curator Suzanne de Vegh noted that the show creates a unique dialogue between historical and modern perspectives.
“Arctic Voices” illuminates the contrasting worldviews, philosophies and environmental attitudes that have shaped how artists from different times and cultures have represented the Arctic and its inhabitants, according to de Vegh.
Using Bradford’s 1869 expedition to the Arctic as a seminal moment, the exhibition explores the changing values and sensibilities from an era in which exploration was often an exercise in the exploitation of natural resources, non-Eurocentric cultures and the cheap labor of others on through to current sensibilities that either embrace — or dismiss according to one’s particular sensibilities — a metaphorical reset button that recognizes cultural differences, social concerns and environmental issues.
Not unlike his acquaintance Albert Bierstadt (born in Prussia in 1830, immigrated to New Bedford in 1831), who explored the Far West of the United States in search of grand landscape subjects, Bradford sought imagery “that made manifest the presence of God in the sublime beauty of nature.” With the support of his wealthy patron LeGrand Lockwood, Bradford chartered a steamship The Panther and had it outfitted for polar exploration, becoming the only 19th-century American artist to specialize in Arctic scenery.
He invited the noted Arctic explorer Dr. Isaac Hayes to join him and hired Critcherson and Dunmore from the Boston photography firm of James Wallace Black to document the voyage.
Their photographs, along with Bradford’s sketches for a series of large scale paintings, became the basis for a book, “The Arctic Regions: Illustrated with Photographs Taken on an Art Expedition to Greenland,” now considered a landmark publication in the history of photographically illustrated books.
Some of Critcherson and Dunmore’s monochromatic photos are stark and mesmerizing, such as “Where we patiently waited and quietly hoped for the ice to open (the Panther in an ice pack).”
Another is titled “This view shows the beautiful forms in varied shapes which the berg assumed” and in which the ice formation itself appears to be giving the photographers a frigid middle finger.
There are a few ethnographic photographs by Critcherson and Dunmore that are discomforting in a lowkey kind of way. Two portraits — “Hans, His Wife and His Children” and “Sophy and Her Sister, Marea” — while certainly acceptable in the era in which they were produced, they now feel a little too much like curiosities to the faraway. Imagine some huckster of the era trying to sell postcards of “the Natives in their natural environment.”
Bradford is represented in the exhibition by two paintings from the collection of the New Bedford Free Public Library. “Quiet Afternoon in the Strait of Belle Isle” is worthy of pensiveness, full of darkness and mystery, as two masted vessels navigate through ice floes under a foreboding sky.
“A Calm Afternoon near Cape Charles, Labrador,” with its pink and lavender candy cloud, speaks to the romantic yearnings of exploration and the gifts of possibility.
In the summer of 2011, the photographer Rena Bass Forman, her husband Scott Forman and explorer Milbry Polk began considering a journey that would retrace Bradford’s 1869 expedition to Greenland. They visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum to see its extensive Bradford collection and enlisted photography curator Michael Lapides to join their expedition.
Sadly, Forman died of a brain tumor in November of the same year while in the midst of planning the expedition. Nonetheless, the journey continued and those aboard saw far less ice than those on the Panther did. Despite what naysayers say even now, evidence of climate change was clear.
In 2013, the New Bedford Whaling Museum presented simultaneous exhibitions: “Arctic Visions: Away Floats the Ice-Island” featuring paintings by Bradford, and “Following the Panther: Arctic Photographs of Rena Bass Forman.”
Now, work by both are together again in “Arctic Voices” at the New Bedford Art Museum. Forman is represented by a trio of toned silver gelatin prints from 2007. They are sharp and majestic and act as contemporary descendants of Critcherson and Dunmore’s visionary images.
Zaria Forman, daughter of Rena — who went on the 2011 Arctic expedition and scattered her mother’s ashes there — uses photography and video to document the evidence of a rapidly changing landscape and it informs her highly detailed and elaborate pastel drawings.
“Fellsfjara, Iceland no. 17” speaks to the urgency of the potential disaster that may be caused by the failure of an adequate response to human-fed climate change.
In a similar vein, mixed media artist Betsey Biggs presents a “topographic remix” of her film “MELT: The Memory of Ice” projected onto adjoining walls that blend “Arctic scenery and ambient music.” She describes it as a “personal meditation on the earth’s body changing, melting and spilling due to climate change.” Frosty the Snowman meets Brian Eno? Cool.
In 2016, while on an expedition from the archipelago off of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Circle, sculptor Lene Tangen took impressions of drift ice, sculpted them in clay and then in wax, before casting them in glass. After the glass is annealed, cold worked and polished, the ice imprints are preserved — frozen, you might say — forever in glass. Her glowing blue and teal “Glacier’s End” is the stuff of make-believe.
But if you are concerned that the possibility of exploration becoming exploitation, white guilt, and climate change on a global scale might get you down, there is certainly some lighter fare to be had and some mythology to consider.
Kenojuak Ashevak’s colorful “Women Speak of Spring Fishing” is absolutely joyful, with five smiling women chatting about fish meals to come and bird visitations, it seems. The artist is a Canadian Inuk and the presence of animals in her life is clearly the source of much mirth. “At the Nest” features some goose or duck delighted by the eggs over which she hovers.
“Fate of Caribou” by Helen Kalvak, a Copper Inuk graphic artist, and “Silver Caribou” by Quvianaqtuk Pudlat, an Inuit screen printer, both show gratitude and respect for the great beast.
“Snowshoe Boy” by Victor Iadne is nothing but perfectly charming.
And everything by Abraham Anghik Ruben, an Inuvialuit Canadian stone sculptor of Yup’ik descent, is brilliant. He honors the shamans and the animals of the tundra, the sea and the sky which provide their wisdom. It’s almost enough to make a believer out of me.
On Dec. 10, “Nebulae: The Universe Unveiled,” featuring photographs from the Hubble telescope, will open at the Art Museum as well and it will touch on the nexus between art and science. There will certainly be connections between the concurrent exhibitions.
Stay tuned.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
