Witch City

Salem in October is a crazy place. There are people walking around in pumpkin leggings and witch hats. Signs everywhere advertise haunted downtown tours and historical tributes to the witch trials. A lot of people come just for the atmosphere. 

Today, I took the train up to Salem, MA to meet with a collaborator. We're planning something pretty cool - an educational program focused on conservation that fuses science and art. To get both of us in the right mindset, she wanted to meet at an art museum - the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. 

The Peabody Essex Museum was originally founded as a way to display artworks, artifacts, and oddities that ship captains brought home to Massachusetts from abroad. The museum has a broad, international focus, and maritime history is palpable throughout. There is a grand ballroom with carved figures from ships' bows on the walls. An oil portrait of Nathaniel Bowditch, father of modern oceanic navigation and a son of Salem, is displayed prominently in a gallery. Even the museum's architecture decries its past, with indoor brick walls separating the original building from the more recent additions. 

The PEM (as it's locally known) is no standard art museum, though. There are no special exhibits dedicated to a single artist or aesthetic. Instead, the galleries are organized by theme. There's an exhibit on American art stretching from Native Americans to Georgia O'Keefe. There's an entire gallery dedicated to conservation. Alongside the oil painting of Nathaniel Bowditch is a display on navigation techniques used by Polynesian mariners. The whole thing is designed to help you draw connections and think critically about how different works relate. 

I have no idea what will come out of my visit to the PEM, but there's a lot of potential there. As some of you may know, I adore modern art and think there are a lot more connections between science and artistic disciplines than most people ever realize. I'm excited to see where our science-art collaboration can go!