Displaying items by tag: Peabody Essex Museum

The Peabody Essex Museum has received a $750,000 grant to expand a fellowship program intended to train aspiring Native American museum professionals. The three-year grant, awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will enable the museum to increase the number of fellows it admits annually, extend the program to 12 weeks, and introduce more formal mentoring programs.

From now on, when Congressman Seth Moulton of Salem goes to work, he might be forgiven for imagining he can smell the salt sea air of home.

Four paintings and one sculpture, all on loan courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, now reside in Moulton's Washington, D.C.,   office. Each reflects either the 6th District's links to the sea or the bloodlines of Marblehead, where Moulton grew up.

After years of delays, the Peabody Essex Museum is moving forward with its expansion plan, adding a gallery wing to the existing complex and a massive off-site facility for managing and conserving collections.

The plan, which the museum announced Wednesday, represents a significant departure from its earlier intent to build a 175,000-square-foot addition to the existing museum. The new design, by contrast, calls for 40,000 square feet in new gallery space and an 80,000-square-foot off-site facility known as the Collection Stewardship Center. The museum hopes to break ground next year, with a projected completion date in 2019.

The 18th-century cabinetmaker Nathaniel Gould left inkblots in his battered gray notebooks as he recorded the luxurious mahogany output of his workshop in Salem, Mass. His listings of clients and fees, found seven years ago in forgotten boxes at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, have enabled researchers to attribute his mostly unsigned antiques. Next weekend, about 20 of these pieces will go on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in the exhibition “In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould.”

The show’s catalog blends tragic family lore with statistics. Gould’s clients lost their furniture in fires, their fortunes in bankruptcies and war and their family members in shipwrecks. Coffins for children were among his workshop’s frequent commissions.

The Peabody Essex Museum announced a $5 million pledge Thursday from the Lynch Foundation, adding to the museum’s already impressive endowment.

The money will be used to establish continuity for the museum’s changing exhibition program, featuring exhibits like the recently opened Alexander Calder display, “Calder and Abstraction: From Avant Garde to Icon.”

The Lynch Foundation, formed by Marblehead’s Carolyn and Peter Lynch in 1988, focuses on health care, education, museums and Roman Catholic religious institutions. Carolyn Lynch has sat on the PEM board for nearly two decades; she is president and chairwoman of the Lynch Foundation.

A little-known Dutch collection of Indian chintzes, newly acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., is revealing centuries of changing habits in fabric exporting, collecting and tailoring.

The museum paid an undisclosed price for about 170 textiles, including bedspreads, caps, jackets and robes, dating to the early 1700s. The designs combine European folk patterns and botanical motifs typical of Mughal landscape paintings.

The Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) announces the completion of a major digitization project that dramatically improves access to the library's online records. Part of a comprehensive $20 million library renovation and improvement initiative, more than 250,000 new catalog records, nearly 50,000 of which reference one-of-a-kind items unique to the Phillips Library, have been created. The records are available to countless researchers worldwide via the Phillips Library website and through OCLC/Worldcat. Boasting 400,000 volumes collected over two centuries, PEM's Phillips Library is one of the largest and oldest museum libraries in the country.

"This project marks a major leap into the modern age and is an invaluable boon to scholarly research," says Sidney Berger, The Ann C. Pingree Director of the Phillips Library.

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) is exhibiting a new installation drawn from the museum’s Native American art collection — the oldest, most comprehensive ongoing collection of its kind in the Western hemisphere.

Raven’s Many Gifts: Native Art of the Northwest Coast celebrates the rich artistic legacy of Native artists along the Pacific Northwest Coast while exploring dynamic relationships among humans, animals, ancestors and supernatural beings. Featuring nearly 30 works from the 19th century to present day, the installation includes superlative examples of works on paper, wood carvings, textiles, films, music and jewelry. Raven’s Many Gifts is on view through mid-2015.

The Peabody Essex Museum is presenting the largest U.S. exhibition of Joseph Mallord William Turner's maritime paintings.

"Turner & the Sea" features more than 100 works spanning the 50-year career of one of Britain's most celebrated painters. Encompassing oils, watercolors, prints and sketches from the 1790s to the mid-1800s, this first full-scale examination of Turner's lifelong attraction to the sea follows the artist's evolution from precocious young painter to one of the most important, controversial and prolific masters of his art. Dramatic and roiling, sunlit and cloudstruck, the power of Turner's glorious canvases changed the maritime aesthetic and influenced countless painters hundreds of years after his time.

On March 29, 2014, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA will present the exhibition ‘California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way.’ The show will include over 250 mid-century modern design objects by pioneering designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra and Greta Magnusson Grossman. Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this exhibition is the first major study of California mid-century modern design and the Peabody Essex Museum will be the show’s only east coast venue.

Works on view, which will include furniture, textiles, graphic design, ceramics, jewelry and architecture, will be contextualized within the creative climate of California and the social and cultural conditions that existed between 1930 and 1965. the exhibition will be divided into four thematic sections--Shaping, Making, Living and Selling--and will explore the origins of modern California design, the materials used, and how the movement proliferated worldwide.  

‘California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way’ will be on view at the Peabody Essex Museum through July 6, 2014.