The Making of The Wider World & Scrimshaw, Part I

Wednesday, October 23, 3-4pm EST, free, on zoom
with Ryan Tucker Jones, Billie Lythberg, Jennifer Wagelie, Ymelda Rivera Laxton, and Naomi Slipp

Join members of the curatorial team and the exhibition’s advisory board to learn about how the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s special exhibition The Wider World & Scrimshaw came together. Hear from scholars, artists, and curators about their connections to the project, what they learned through this process, and where their work goes from here. Speakers will highlight their favorites from among the over 300 items in the show, and share what themes and stories resonate most with them. This free, online program is a unique opportunity to peek behind the scenes, listen, and learn.

About the speakers:

 Ryan Tucker Jones is Ann Swindells Professor of Global Environmental History at the University of Oregon. He is author of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea (2014) and Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (2022) and coeditor of Across Species and Cultures:  Whales, Humans and Pacific Worlds (2022), Migrant Ecologies:  Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (2022), and The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean (2023).

Ymelda Rivera Laxton currently serves as the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & Community Projects at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. She plays a central role in managing, developing, and interpreting the Museum’s collection of contemporary art, which is both local and global, and is liaison to the local and regional artist community. Her work is committed to enhancing the visibility of underrepresented communities and connecting visitors with personal histories. Ymelda has worked for over twenty years in a variety of positions in the museum field in New England, California, Texas, and Washington. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle and a BA in History from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas.

 Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, Billie Lythberg is of Swedish, Scottish, and English descent. She is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies in the Faculty of Business & Economics at Waipapa Taumata Rau | the University of Auckland, working on multiple projects with Māori and Moana colleagues. She completed postdoctoral work at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Billie is co-author of Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories (University of Otago Press, 2016), Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, 1791 1794 (Sidestone Press, 2018), and two seasons of the documentary series ARTEFACT, funded by NZ On Air (2018, 2020); and coeditor of The Concept of Vā: Relationality, Time and Space in the Pacific and Beyond (Forthcoming, ANU Press).

Naomi Slipp is Chief Curator and Director of Museum Learning at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and oversees education, curatorial, and collections. She has presented widely on nineteenth-century American visual and material culture and intersections between art and science, and published in Sculpture Journal, Panorama, and British Art Studies, and the edited volumes Bodies beyond Borders: Moving Anatomies, 1750–1950, Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, and Victorian Science and Imagery: Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. Recent exhibitions with scholarly publications include "A Singularly Marine and Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed" and "Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes."

Jennifer Wagelie earned her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center at CUNY, focusing on art of the Pacific Islands, with an emphasis on the institutional history of Māori art in the United States. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of British Columbia, and previously worked in museum education at the National Gallery of Art, the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. She now serves at the Director of Learning at California State University, Sacramento's Office for Cultural Transformation in the Division of Inclusive Excellence.