Maine Maritime Museum charts a new course with art installation on warming ocean
June 11, 2023
Portland Press Herald Sunday Telegram Sunday Telegram
Megan Gray
The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath is dipping into unfamiliar waters.
In February, the museum opened “SeaChange: Darkness and Light in the Gulf of Maine,” an immersive art installation that will run through the end of the year. The project by Gulf of Maine EcoArts re-creates an underwater mountain range called Cashes Ledge and invites visitors to reflect on our human impact on the ocean. At Maine Maritime Museum, where the focus has typically been on nautical history, the exhibit is a shift in both its size and subject.
The Maine Maritime Museum Goes Where No Ship Wants to Go
May 2023 issue
Down East Magazine
Will Grunewald
The Maine Maritime Museum is in Bath, the City of Ships, just a half mile down the road from Bath Iron Works, Maine’s largest shipyard. And so ships and the people who build and sail them have, unsurprisingly, been the museum’s chief preoccupation over its six-decade history. If capstans, harpoons, sea chests, and other old nautical paraphernalia are what float your boat, don’t worry — there’s still plenty of that on display. But now there’s also SeaChange: Darkness & Light in the Gulf of Maine, a conceptual installation, by the Gulf of Maine EcoArts collective, that looks unlike anything the museum has shown in the past.
Art review: ‘SeaChange: Darkness and Light in the Gulf of Maine’ brings out your inner activist
May 10, 2023
Times Record / Portland Press Herald
Maria Skillings
The multi-sensory exhibit draws attention to climate change, environmental activism and a fish haven off the coast of Maine called Cashes Ledge.
Maine Maritime Museum in Bath partnered with Gulf of Maine EcoArts to build an immersive oceanic exhibit, highlighting climate change and the hidden fish oasis called Cashes Ledge — an underwater mountain range located 70 miles off the coast of Maine.
Maine Maritime Museum offers free weekend admission
March 18, 2023
WMTW-8 ABC
Miles Hood
BATH, Maine — The Maine Maritime Museum is looking to increase accessibility through education by offering free weekends. The promotion is a partnership with Bath Savings.
With plenty of artifacts and history plus two new exhibits, visitors can enjoy new exhibits on view including “Women Behind the Lens: The Photography of Emma D. Sewall, Josephine Ginn Banks, and Abbie F. Minott,” and “Featured Finds” documenting ongoing research into the provenance, or earliest known history, of items in the museum’s collection. Along with “SeaChange: Darkness and Light in the Gulf of Maine,” which is a partnership with Gulf of Maine EcoArts, a site-specific art and ecology installation.
READ FULL ARTICLE AND VIEW CLIP >
Where Art and Science Intersect
January 3, 2023
Colby News
by Dominick Leskiw
Viva Goetze ’24 is helping transform a small room inside the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath into a vast seascape. Oceanic paintings, sculptures, fabrics, ceramics, videos, lights, and sounds coalesce in Sea Change: Darkness and Light in the Gulf of Maine, the newest installation in an ongoing climate change awareness project by Maine-based artist Anna Dibble.
A New Art Installation Illustrates a Changing Gulf of Maine
January, 2022
The Maine Magazine
Over this past summer, artist Pamela Moulton worked in her screened-in studio at Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, at the foothills of the White Mountains. Carefully deconstructing and reassembling fishing materials washed up from the ocean floor, she tells the story of the ghost gear that lies tumbling underwater, beyond what we can see from boats and beaches. At the same time, Andy Rosen, a South Portland– based artist, was working at the shop of fabricator and craftsman David Mahany. Bit by bit, pieces of plywood, driftwood, and sections of roots and branches grew to reveal the skeleton of a massive North Atlantic right whale, alive with movement and subtle color. Architect and sculptor Joe Hemes applied his knowledge of producing light-filled sculptural objects to create scientifically accurate depictions of bioluminescent ocean creatures. And Anna Dibble, the artist who spearheaded all of these activities, collaborated with educator Lee Chisholm to create three-dimensional bird forms while building and refining her plan for an immersive, ethereal installation of all these suspended sculptural objects that bridges art and science at East Boothbay’s Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.
New art exhibit emphasizes human impact on Gulf of Maine’s littered and warming waters
December 27, 2021
WMTW TV Channel 8
Steve Minich, anchor
BOOTHBAY, Maine —
It is well-documented how warming waters and trash are impacting the Gulf of Maine.
It is those very issues that are portrayed in a new art exhibit at the Bigelow Laboratories for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay. The exhibit is two stories high and is a unique perspective of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem, a world beneath the surface.
Art installation at Bigelow Lab takes deep dive into ocean health
November 14, 2021
Portland Press Herald Sunday Telegram
Bob Keyes
A new, two-story exhibition features a life-size whale, comb jellies and ghost gear to highlight the beauty and perils of what’s happening below the ocean’s surface.
EAST BOOTHBAY — Anna Dibble looked up at the 24-foot wooden North Atlantic right whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and allowed herself a moment of satisfaction.
“It looks stunning,” she said.
New Installation Fuses Art and Science to Share Ocean Wonder
November 4, 2021
Bigelow Laboratory Press Release
A new two-story art installation that celebrates ocean life in the Gulf of Maine and the scientific efforts to understand it will open at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences on Nov. 9. “Majestic Fragility” was created by Gulf of Maine EcoArts artists, in collaboration with ocean scientists and students from across the state.
USM ART Students participate in Gulf of Maine EcoArts project
April 20, 2021
USM Art Department
This project is an art/science/educational initiative that focuses on the changes in biodiversity in the Gulf of Maine due to climate change and other human impact. It was initiated by artist Anna Dibble who is collaborating with other artists, scientists, teachers and exhibition designers to implement the program.
A Freeport artist and her team step up to address the warming sea
June 15, 2020
Portland Press Herald
COVID-19 has curtailed some of the early activities of Gulf of Maine Ecoarts, but the project continues.
Two years ago, the artist Anna Dibble helped create and paint a 7-foot-long Atlantic Cod from paper mache. She joined members of the climate justice group 350Maine as they gave the fish a funeral march through Portland’s Old Port, accompanied by a New Orleans-style jazz band. There were eulogies and songs on the steps of City Hall for the old cod, all designed to call attention to the growing toll of climate change in the Gulf of Maine.
Science/visual arts collaboration: seventh graders contribute models to traveling exhibition
March 9, 2020
The Waynflete Wire
In 2019, Portland artist Anna Dibble began planning a collaborative public art installation to help promote stewardship and awareness by reconnecting people with the natural world. The multi-year art/science/education initiative would focus specifically on biodiversity changes in the Gulf of Maine caused by climate change and other human impacts. Anna founded the organization Gulf of Maine EcoArts to coordinate the effort.