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Summer in New Bedford brings the Seaport Art Walk, founded by Jessica Bregoli-Sparling when she was a sculpture major at UMass Dartmouth 11 years ago. Around long enough to be called an institution, the annual public art installation has popped up every year on the waterfront along Route 18 between Elm and School Streets.
This year, there are seven artists, each working within an overall theme: “Call of the Sea.” It is focused enough to provide common links and visual conversation but vague enough to allow for personal quirky stories that reveal glimpses into what reverberates for each, including history, nature, adventure, community, music, and the waterfront.
The Art Walk garnered a bit of lowkey notoriety in 2016 when sculptor Donna Dodson exhibited “Seagull Cinderella,” a large three-dimensional and rather buxom cartoonish figure that was part bird and part fairy tale princess, stark white with a yellow beak. Some residents were outraged by her bust, even demanding that it be removed.
Of course, there was a backlash from those who loved Seagull Cinderella and came to her defense. Decals were printed and stickered on car bumpers, barroom mirrors and stop signs. It made national news and became a bit of a feminist icon. Dodson received much attention, the vast majority of it positive. Slightly revamped, but no less buxom, SC returned to the Art Walk in 2023 for the 10th anniversary celebration to the pleasure of her many fans.
This year, there is nothing that could offend anyone even with the most Victorian of sensibilities, save for the possibility of a naked metallic man, devoid of any apparatus other than his surfboard.
There are three painters and four sculptors displaying work. One of those sculptors is Ed McAloon, who has fond memories of spending his summers on the beaches in the city’s South End in the 1960s and listening to the Beach Boys. He created the aforementioned unclad glimmering figure.
He nostalgically recalls that era as his introduction to surf culture and created “Surfin’ USA.”
Naked, hairless and without facial features or genitalia, he straddles a surfboard, his legs cocked at the knees, his hips thrust back and his arms raised for balance. Equal parts Silver Surfer and Frankenstein’s monster, with rough welds that look like stitches, he appears to be flashing his backside at the folks in queue to board the ferry to Cuttyhunk.
A few yards to the north are three faux unpainted pine framed windows, tightly abutting each other. Roughly 10’ wide x 5’ high, Jacob Ginga’s “The View from Here” features inventive reimaginings of what is directly outside the favorite windows of three New Bedford residents: Beatriz Oliveira, Sarah Moniz, and Bryan Ribeiro.
Ginga, who is known to many in the art community as Maker Jake, attempts to reflect how diverse people experience their city. Scanning a QR code below the painting brings one to a very brief bio of the three residents and a personal playlist curated by each of them.
Oliveira offered up five songs, including Sergio Mendes “Diagonal,” and one of Moniz’s choices was a “Let You In” remix by Safiyyah, a London-based R&B and soul singer of Portuguese and Moroccan heritage. Intriguingly, Ribeiro left only a message that said “coming soon.”
Sculptor Brooke Mullins Doherty’s response to the call to artists and to the call of the sea was inspired by the lyrics and even more so, the harmony of a traditional New Zealand sea shanty called “The Wellerman.” She and her young children discovered the song last year, which led to “a family deep dive into the world of sea shanties with their fascinating combination of history lesson and driving beat.”
The lilting song tells the tale of a whaling ship and its crew and their long hunt for a right whale. It harmoniously speaks to the crew’s desperate hope for the arrival of a supply boat known as a wellerman to bring them little luxuries, namely sugar, tea and rum.
A sample stanza:
“No line was cut, no whale was freed
The captain’s mind was not of greed
And he belonged to the whaleman’s creed
She took that ship in tow, huh…”
In her preliminary sketches for her sculpture that she called “Sea Shanty,” Doherty drew the harmony of the chorus as a fluid line that rose and sank across vertical lines that represented the steady beat. The intersection between relatively straight lines and those that curved began to take the form of an octopus.
What grew from there was a steel armature with eight coiled tentacles, ultimately covered with blue, white, lavender and violet tulle held in place with a monofilament line. The end result is something that is half cephalopod and half garden flower, a perfect marriage of sea and land.
Painter Mark Carvalho’s “If You Can Read the Stars, You’ll Never Be Lost” features his trademark one-stencil and aerosol spray paint technique. It features a crusty old graybeard sea captain in a wool cap peering through a sextant.
Carvalho (a.k.a. Boston Maki) has always been obsessed with the stars and the sea, and he regularly hikes and kayaks. He readily admits to his dependence on GPS but harbors tremendous respect to those who used — and still use — old-school navigational technology. In a brief talk at the official commencement of the exhibition, he said, “To any of you Generation Z-ers here, a sextant is an analog for GPS, if you know how to use it.”
In the previous year’s iteration of the Seaport Art Walk, artist Mandy Fraser painted “Secret City Whales” on a set of Jersey barriers in the parking lot of the State Pier. This year, she returned to do a not-quite sequel but a spin-off of sorts.
Joining the whales are a yellow flounder, a red lobster and a blue-gray Atlantic cod. It should be noted that this undersea menagerie is a work in progress, as Fraser will soon return to take on the last five Jersey barriers and emblazon them with images of haddock, tuna, scallops, blue lobster and a to-be-announced “secret design.” All are an homage to the bounty of the sea.
Bregoli-Sparling’s “Sea Bells” is not a sculpture in the traditional sense but rather a giant wind chime. She notes that “from the shore, one can hear the many distinctive sounds of the ocean. Floating above the crashing of the waves and the call of seagulls, you will often hear the ringing of a bell. Be it from a buoy, lighthouse or passing boat, it offers a signal of guidance to all within listening distance.”
The peal of the bell is haunting, nonetheless.
The seventh artist, Connecticut resident Chris Plaisted, is the only participant not on the east side of Route 18. Instead, his sculpture is across the busy road, in front of the New Bedford Tattoo Company.
“Skuldelev” is an abstract steel sculpture painted indigo blue. It references a quintet of Viking ships recovered from the the waterway of Peberrenden at Skuldelev, north of Roskilde in Denmark. Its form is an outline of the sail and hull of a ship. Below are the imagined monsters of the sea.
Plaisted hopes to inspire viewers to remain steadfast in their commitment to preserving our collective cultural heritage and to protecting the environment. Noble goals indeed.
From the philosophical to the whimsical and from the beautiful to the melancholy, the deep blue has much to reveal.
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
