“Aberration” at the New Bedford Art Museum
September 4, 2024
by Amy Desrosiers, Explore New Bedford
New Bedford is home to many galleries, museums, coworking spaces, and other visual arts institutions, including open-air spaces that feature rotating or permanent public art installations. For over a century, the city has been a hub for aspiring and established artists, with anchoring higher education institutions drawing in creatives who then forged a community of artists, establishing the need and means for a creative economy. In 2016 the Massachusetts Cultural Council named New Bedford the state’s most creative community and in 2011 urban studies theorist Richard Florida deemed New Bedford the seventh most artistic city in the country. For a city with this much artistic enterprise, the institutions that support the creative economy are tasked to step up to the plate and deliver a critical platform of diverse and engaging exhibitions and programs. For Executive Director Suzanne de Vegh, this means contextualizing the New Bedford Art Museum’s exhibits with regard to the current local and global social climate. This is no small task!
Collaboration
Stepping into her role at the New Bedford Art Museum in 2022, de Vegh remained steadfast in preserving the museum founders’ mission of serving as a community anchor and fostering collaborative partnerships, while also growing the museum’s capacity for a diversity of exhibits. When the museum opened in 1996, the founders endeavored to ensure that the institution showcased local talent and included some of the City’s art collection. One of their earliest shows included some of James Audubon’s Birds of America prints from the collection housed at the New Bedford Free Public Library. In 2023, de Vegh presented an exhibit in partnership with Massachusetts Design Art and Technology Institute, DATMA, that featured select Audubon prints alongside the work of Brooklyn-based artist Adrian Brandon. Under the Sheltering Sky was part of DATMA’s 2023 Shelter program that elicited different notions of shelter, which are often transitory, insecure, or uncertain. Positioning Audubon’s prints of birds in nests aside Brandon’s work provided a critical lens into how human structures impact the already fragile status of security for wildlife. Significantly, Brandon’s work also critiques the inherent lack of intersectionality that pervades the scientific and social realms of ornithology and the lack of discourse around Audubon’s racism and slave ownership. Brandon and ornithologist J. Drew Lanham, whose essay motivated the selection of Audubon prints commissioned by the National Audubon Society, are amongst those critiquing the historically patriarchal structures that have delineated ornithology and conservation as white spaces.
Aberration
The most recent exhibition at the museum continues the tradition of showcasing local talent and curation that includes a critical engagement with the artist’s range and artistic references. Aberration reflects a personal, often autobiographical framework while also conveying sentiments familiar for many in the New Bedford community and beyond. Alex Buchanan is a sculptor whose work is born of his experience as a mariner. While some might not know the breadth and depth of New Bedford’s artistic community, most recognize the city’s significant role as a working waterfront, spanning generations of fishing families. As de Vegh notes, Buchanan’s work “reflects aspects of our regional culture.”
Throughout the exhibition there are references to maritime culture that are personal for the artist as well as the viewer with a working knowledge or similar experience with marine industry. Echo designates the letter ‘e’ in the phonetic alphabet and in morse code ‘e’ is represented by a single dot. Echo uses a single rope using a weaving technique that has no beginning and no end. It is visually a single dot. Oscar’s Away plays on this same theme with Oscar representing ‘o’ in the phonetic alphabet, and 3 dots employed for morse code. There is a fourth ring of rope representing Oscar getting away or could be a float being sent into the water to rescue the individual overboard. “Oscar’s away” is the phrase used when someone falls overboard at sea.
The materials used in Buchanan’s work are everyday utilitarian, industrial, and can be found strolling along the harbor. Tugboat ropes, iron rods, steel shackles, construction culls, with the inclusion of driftwood comprise his sculptures. These retired materials often come from a recycling center specifically for maritime industries that Buchanan volunteers with called Net Your Problem. Environmentalism and sustainability are at the core of his work, which brings to the forefront what is lingering behind closed doors, or within as individual inner contention. His pieces Shibari and Delta Romeo Foxtrot are playful, but also profess a sense of urgency, of personal and universal responsibility. Our individual habits when it comes to waste are not “table talk,” as Buchanan notes. They are tucked away as a landfill is tucked away. Shibari is physically tucked away in the museum in a narrow back room with the steel bar doorway partially closed to create the sense of a more secretive hideaway. Delta Romeo Foxtrot is more figurative than Buchanan’s other works, depicting a giant flower emerging from an oak barrel. The artist sees this piece as a “giant picket sign” made of recycled commercial carabiners and steel rods from clam boats serving as a reminder that caring for the environment is a responsibility that belongs to everyone.
Aberration combines playfulness with consequence, industrial with lyrical, and personal with universal. Big heavy coarse ropes also have colors, textures, and gradients that engage a meditative mode of looking. The process of creating the works is also somewhat meditative, while also arduous, mimicking the struggles of working in the maritime industry and the internal battles we face in contending with waste. Buchanan reflects on hauling in the heavy ropes working on a tugboat and in some ways his forging them into shapes is in defiance of that process, changing the form and meaning of something utilitarian into something visually ethereal. He states, “By taking these materials in that exact state of dismissal and organizing them into patterns, I ask you to look again and determine rather what we are viewing should have even been considered a discard.” Waste is transformed into something beautiful and is suddenly seen, which begs the question of why it was considered waste to begin with and cast aside to be forgotten.
Aberration is on view at The New Bedford Art Museum through October 27. See more exhibits and stay tuned to special programs at the museum by visiting their website.