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Indepth Arts News:
"Suggestive Curves"
2000-01-28 until 2000-05-07
Peabody Essex Museum
Salem, MA,
USA United States of America
Boat-building is a time-honored craft, one that takes long
training, patience, and aesthetic sensibility. Yet rarely have
American museums treated it as a visual art in the manner
of painting, sculpture, or even architecture.
On January 28, the Peabody Essex Museum gives boat
design its due with Suggestive Curves. This
groundbreaking exhibition showcases the work of
craftsmen from the United States, Native America, Asia,
and the Pacific Islands, spanning two centuries of
small-watercraft design. Suggestive Curves offers a new
look at an old trade by displaying boats in ways that draw
attention to their shape and elegance. The exhibition runs
through May 7, 2000.
Each of the twenty-two boats selected for this exhibition is
a descendant of a long ancestry of innovation and
experimentation, says Lyles Forbes, the museum1s
assistant curator for maritime art and history who organized
Suggestive Curves. Their contours and configuration
reflect the purposes for which they1re used. And while
they1re primarily working boats, they all exhibit an innate
beauty independent of their function.
For example, there is a sealskin kayak built in Greenland
sometime in the late nineteenth century. Its Inuit designer
skillfully employed what few materials he had at his
disposal: sealskin tautly sewn over a frame of willow or
driftwood. The lightweight craft is scarcely wider than the
passenger it is designed to carry. As such, it1s perfectly
suited to cut through the strong winds and icy seas of the
Davis Strait. But a look at the kayak today reveals that
pragmatic considerations weren1t the only ones its builder
took into account
The Peabody Essex Museum began collecting small
watercraft in the 1820s. So the boats in Suggestive
Curves reflect the museum1s diverse collections of art and
culture: a double-outrigger canoe from Bali, Indonesia; a
Burmese sampan; a birch bark canoe from the Cree tribe;
the sailing dory of a Swampscott fisherman.
Yet while more than half the boats in Suggestive Curves
come from that collection, the others are drawn from a
diverse group of American maritime museums and
institutions. There1s a pirogue from Thibodeaux Louisiana,
courtesy of the Center for Traditional Louisiana
Boatbuilding; a Housatonic oyster skiff from the Mystic
Seaport Museum; and even a California longboard from the
Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum. Each
boat in the exhibition represents a distinctive
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