In American Waters

About

In American Waters highlights American art historical and cultural traditions associated with the sea, deepening our understanding of it as a symbol of American ambition, opportunity, and invention. The histories of American art have long privileged ways of imagining American culture that only tell a partial story and that overlook narratives of national and individual experience past and present. This ambitious volume reveals the sea as an expansive way to reflect on American culture and environment and to question what it means to be “in American waters.”

For more than 200 years, American painters have been inspired to capture the beauty, violence, poetry, and transformative power of the sea in American life. Their images of the sea have also expressed ambitions beyond America’s borders in aesthetically and conceptually distinctive ways. The eight essays included here offer a more inclusive way of thinking about American marine painting by reconsidering national symbols and narratives, origin stories, coastlines, horizons, and ports, and broadening the conversation to embrace perspectives on the Middle Passage, immigration, and Indigenous presence. Lavishly illustrated with more than 120 images, In American Waters features fascinating historical paintings alongside works by major modern and contemporary artists.

The exhibition, on view at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, from May 29 through October 3, 2021, features a diverse range of modern and historical artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay WalkingStick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus, Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, Valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis, and many others. In American Waters is co-organized by PEM and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The exhibition will be on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas from November 6, 2021 to January 31, 2022.

Major Traveling Exhibition ‘In American Waters’ Casts New Light On Our Relationship With the Sea (ArtFix Daily)

Authors

Daniel Finamore is Associate Director–Exhibitions and The Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History, Peabody Essex Museum.

Austen Barron Bailly is Chief Curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Review

“Bringing so many important paintings into the same room, as it were, was an outstanding achievement of the original exhibition, and the book represents a welcome surrogate for and legacy from that gallery experience. … Only by pulling from a broad pool of works have the curator-authors been able to truly ‘reflect upon the ways Americans have perceived, utilized, and lived with the sea and its impact over time.’ (p. 40) The result is a book deserving of being on the shelf of everyone interested in the sea and all it represents.”
—Michael R. Harrison, Maritime Social History, 2023