Startling Museum Exhibit Explores the Main Role Seaweed - Yes, Algae - Plays in Classic Works of Art and Design

The shelves are filled with books that dive deep into the history of a single supposedly overlooked subject, often making sweeping claims about how they shaped history: salt. Corpses. Cod. Sheep.

Now open at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, a surprising exhibition in the same vein: “A Singularly Marine and Fabulous Produce: the Cultures of Seaweed” (until December 3). The show takes its name from a passage by Henry David Thoreau, who called seaweed “a Neptune-worthy invention to adorn his car”, adding that it is one of the seafood products that has “a certain fabulous quality”.

“The project’s programming and catalog draws connections between the cultural histories of seaweed as explored in the exhibition and today’s pressing environmental issues related to climate change, aquaculture and sustainability, where seaweed is at the forefront,” chief curator Naomi Slipp said in a press release. Slipp curated the exhibit with Maura Coughlin, a professor at Northeastern University who specializes in ecocritical art history, and it includes works ranging from the 19th century to examples by contemporary artists like Mark Dion.

Casual beachgoers may find seaweed distasteful, but these plants are a key part of coastal economies, used for fertilizers, home insulation and livestock bedding, as Slipp pointed out, and so have since long attracted the attention of artists and artisans.

The exhibit centers around the nearly eight-foot-wide painting by Massachusetts-born artist Clement Nye SwiftAlgae pickers, which he exhibited at the 1878 Salon in Paris. It was painted in Pont-Aven in Brittany, a region of France where artists fleeing Paris painted idealized versions of local peasants. Slipp points out in the catalog that such depictions were, at the time Swift arrived there, nostalgic renderings of an imagined pre-industrial past.

Also on display are paintings by major figures such as John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth, as well as decorative art by notable brands such as Gorham and Wedgewood, as well as scrapbooks, collages and early photographs by anonymous creators. Striking works include an 1880s photograph of a woman in a dress adorned with seaweed, a silver and gold Tiffany punch bowl decorated with a pattern of seaweed, and a life-size bronze sculpture of a fisherman’s sweater in seaweed and wax by the artist Céleste Roberge.

A list of impactful institutions loaned works to the exhibition, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery, the RISD Museum and the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

See more images from the show below.