The Nicholson Whaling Collection has been used by numerous researchers for historical and scientific purposes, but some of our favorite interactions are with artists finding inspiration in whaling artifacts.
The Whale Guitar
For the past decade the Whale Guitar has been on a mission to raise awareness about threats facing whales and our oceans. Jen Long and her collaborators visited the Nicholson Collection in 2014 and found visual inspiration in the collection’s scrimshaw and logbooks.
Natalie Paris, Tomorrow Ye Will Get Your Pay
Natalie Paris is an an author, artist, and engineer, with a passion for writing science fiction. For the 2024 Creative Fellowship, they are writing the novel Tomorrow Ye Will Get Your Pay, about whaling and climate change. Click here to read the first two chapters.
Abigail Dolan, Digital Humanities Fellow
Abby Dolan is a Librarian who has worked in a variety of academic settings creating digital humanities projects and supporting the projects of others. For the Digital Humanities Fellowship, she created an interface to connect and display various aspects of the 1887 voyage of the Eunice H. Adams.
Allison Bianco
Allison Bianco was awarded a RISCA Make Art Grant to work with Ben Watkins to create site-specific frames that wrap around the corners of the library’s interior architecture for an exhibition entitled Stand to Sea (April 3 – June 30, 2024). Bianco researched at Special Collections blending a myriad of scrapbook references, aerial photographs, whaling log illustrations and even sentiments of historic Japanese kawaraban papers to create her copper plate etchings with screen print entitled Stand to Sea and So Ends This Day. Stand to Sea imagines watery worlds through the lens of maritime artwork traditions. The rising sea of mythic proportions comes in the form of seven waves that travel over hundreds of years, past whales and whaling ships, from the edges of far away oceans to the Atlantic where they reach land at the Point Street Bridge in Providence, Rhode Island on September 21, 1938. So ends this day imagines a voyage from the hurricane of 1938 to Captain William A. Martin’s harrowing whaling journey from 1887 aboard the E.H. Adams, in one of the most hurricane-ridden seasons of the century. To learn more visit The Making of Stand to Sea. And hear Allison discuss her research and artistic process on Rhode Island PBS.
