Members Enjoy a Summer Full of Celebrations and Special Access!

For more information on Member events, to become a Member, or to give a gift of membership, contact the Membership Department at 860.572.5339, membership@mysticseaport.org, or visit mysticseaport.org/join.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Member Lounge, located in the Membership Building, is a great place to cool off on a hot summer day. Visit and enjoy complimentary lemonade, coffee, or tea in a relaxed, parlor atmosphere. The lounge is also where you can stock up on exclusive Member merchandise! Our friendly staff will welcome you and can help with any questions you may have about the Museum or your membership. Open daily 12:00-4:00 pm.

SUMMER OF THE SHIPYARD!

The Henry B. du Pont Preservation Shipyard and our skilled shipwrights continue to preserve the traditions of wooden boatbuilding for generations to come. If you haven’t yet discovered what all the buzz is about, join us as the Membership Department celebrates the Shipyard with unique tours and cruises throughout the summer!

MEMBER EVENINGS!

Launch into summer with the Summer Evening Celebration on Saturday, June 10, and ease into fall with the Member Appreciation Night on Saturday, September 23. These free events offer Members and their guests an opportunity to experience the Museum after hours, which is magical as the sun sets over the Mystic River. Pack a picnic and enjoy access to select exhibitions, special programs, and activities including boat rides, tours, games on the green, toy boat building, live music, and more!

MEMBER WEEKENDS!

During Member weekends, July 8-9 and August 5-6, Members are invited behind the scenes for fascinating tour opportunities. To sweeten the deal, your Member discount will be doubled in Greenmans’ Landing, Spouter Tavern, Propeller Café, and the Museum store.

SABINO CRUISES!

Sabino downriver music cruises are back! On July 27, August 24, and September 7, tap your feet and sing along as we cruise down the Mystic River on the historic steamboat Sabino, originally built in 1908. Members can register early by calling the Membership Department before tickets go on sale to the public June 1. Order early before they sell out!

SEPTEMBER IS MEMBER APPRECIATION MONTH!

Members are celebrated throughout the month of September with special programs and treats! Bring one friend for FREE Monday through Friday, all month long. If your friend becomes a Member, we'll extend your membership by one month! If you have a PLUS feature on your current membership, you may bring an additional friend for free Monday through Friday all month long!

By Christina Connett Brophy, PhD, Senior Vice President of Curatorial Affairs

American maritime heritage as historically presented at Mystic Seaport Museum has largely focused on the surface of the world’s ocean, that which is most accessible and visible to the terrestrial audiences we serve. However, the Museum has begun augmenting its exhibitions, holdings, and scholarship to look toward the undersea world. This shift in perspective is to raise awareness and inspire conversations around the critical global issues that face our oceans due to the impacts of maritime activities as part of our collective cultural, social, and economic heritage. As an institution we are rethinking what our traditional interpretation of maritime heritage means for the future as blue economies, technologies, and innovations reinvent the way we preserve and protect, exploit and explore our oceans.

One of the strategies to engage dialogue and reach a broader audience on these issues is through contemporary art. For decades, the internationally renowned artist Alexis Rockman has filtered his enormous curiosity and study of science and history into exquisitely immersive experiences that are breathtaking in technical skill and stunning in composition and color. In 2021, the Museum commissioned Rockman to create Oceanus, a series of eleven paintings, including the monumental 8-by-24-foot central work also titled Oceanus (seen in part on the previous page) and ten large-scale watercolors. In the tradition of natural history museums, Rockman provides a key to the species and important objects represented to illustrate the real science behind the paintings. Rockman had conversations with every contributor to the companion publication, from scientists to historians to explorers, thus providing the authenticity which forms the baseline for this remarkable series. The beauty of Rockman’s approach is the circularity of his strategy: science gets creativity and art gets data, a co-creation in the shared space of imagination and knowledge, connecting emotion with facts.

In Oceanus, Alexis Rockman covers themes related to the undersea world that are essential to understanding our place and role in the current and future health of our oceans. The central painting in particular is a time capsule of our legacy in this regard. He addresses critical environmental and social justice issues of our past, present, and future, including climate change and sea level rise; both the forced and intentional ocean passages of people; the introduction of marine species through human activities, now exacerbated by climate change; maritime commerce and industry; and the cultural mystery and fascination of this last largely unknown part of our world. Using the Mystic Seaport Museum ship model collection and our unique position on a river teeming with introduced species, this new series brings attention to our largely alien ocean and our impact upon it. Rockman’s sincerity, passion, and attention to detail draw you into the scene but then allow a twist, a sequence of compressions that belie reality and reveal his critical interpretation. In the central work, Oceanus, Rockman has brought together a line of maritime vessels moving along the ocean surface which culminates in a tsunami wave of epic proportions and luminescent colors. While few of these ships were historically concurrent, in their presentation here we are able to see the succession of technologies that allowed profitable and destructive exploitation of the seas. This exploitation has led to disaster for many species. The tuna, cod, shrimp, squid, and others have each been heavily harvested. Some species, like the oyster, have suffered terrible decimation only to be brought back by sustainable methods of aquafarming.

Rockman’s watercolors are by their nature more loosely rendered and abstracted than the oil on panel painting. Their juxtaposition with the central painting provides a visual shift from their immensely detailed larger companion work. They elicit an exquisite visceral response with their large swaths of intense fluid colors, engaging compositions, and over-size format.

Rockman’s brilliant method of creating sensorial pleasure at first glance makes the effect of the secondary response to their darker themes of biological invasions, mass extinctions, coastal destructions, loss of biodiversity, and others all the more profound. For example, in Transient Passage (pictured this page), one is drawn to the glorious oranges and greens of the composition’s infrastructure of buoy and sea, followed by the sea creatures—the jewel-like yellow butterfly fish and the blue colony of sea anemones. However, what the image really portrays is these animals’ transit to places they are not meant to be, where they may wreak havoc on native species in a new environment, supported and protected on their journey by a man-made ecosystem of plastics.

There is hope for a sustainable and healthy ocean, thanks to thousands of solutions-based ocean health remediators and innovators, several of whom are represented in the exhibition. But even with these extraordinary investments in the future blue economy, the urgency and destruction that reverberate throughout Rockman’s Oceanus series are very real. As we look at our global maritime heritage, which Mystic Seaport Museum is committed to preserving, these paintings will spark critical discussions on a crisis that faces us all. It is very much our hope that this groundbreaking series of paintings inspires productive conversation and a rethinking of what has been and shall be our maritime legacy.

Transient Passage, 2022, highlighting coastal animals that have adapted to survive in the open ocean by colonizing plastic pollution.