A singularly marine & fabulous produce”: the Cultures of Seaweed

A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: the Cultures of Seaweed opens to the public from June 16 – December 3, 2023 and is curated by Naomi Slipp, Douglas and Cynthia Crocker Endowed Chair for the Chief Curator, and Maura Coughlin, Northeastern University. This major exhibition of over 125 works probes humankind’s fascination with seaweed from 1780 to today, tracking changing aesthetics and modes of representation, all while underscoring a continuous and unwavering interest in seaweed as “singularly marine & fabulous,” as described by Thoreau. Art, science, and industry combine in this innovative exhibition that thinks about the past cultures of seaweed, and its applications today and into the future.

Nineteenth-century American, European, and English audiences were drawn to the myriad unique and mysterious qualities of this vegetation of the sea. Seaweed was a subject of middle-class parlor entertainments, personal gift giving practices, serious scientific study, industrial application, “making-do” working-class culture, culinary experimentation, and aesthetic examination in painting, photography, sculpture, decorative arts, and textiles. In various locations, seaweed appealed to working class laborers and farmers, and to middle and upper class collectors and scientists. It also appeared as a subject and a material in fine art, personal scrapbooks, and various shoreline industries, and is today a celebrated subject and material in contemporary art.

This major exhibition at the NBWM includes loans from over thirty lenders along the Eastern seaboard. Objects in the exhibit range from rarely exhibited watercolors by significant American artists John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth to exuberant decorative arts – including glass, silver, and ceramics — by Pairpoint Company, Tiffany & Company, Wedgewood, Thomas J. Wheatley, Haviland/Limoges, and Georges Hoentschel – to amateur-made seaweed albums, collages, and early salt-paper and cyanotype photographs.