The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s scrimshaw collection, which includes hundreds of whalebone clocks, pie crimpers, musical instruments, canes and umbrellas, is advertised as the largest of its kind in the world.
Naomi Slipp, the museum’s chief curator, said these items weren’t considered fine art when the museum’s founders began collecting them from locals in 1903, right as petroleum and electricity were replacing whale oil as America’s main sources of artificial light.
Slipp said scrimshaw – carved by deckhands with the bones leftover from butchering whales – only took on classier connotations later in the century, thanks in large part to the personal collecting habits of John F. Kennedy. Despite its humble origins, scrimshaw today is a stock image of old money, and an aspirational signifier for those who weren’t fortunate enough to inherit any.
So it comes as a surprise to see the latest piece Slipp included in the Whaling Museum’s scrimshaw gallery: a plastic bottle of engine coolant, painted and waxed to look like bone, depicting a grim scene of environmental degradation.
The words “New Bedford” loom over a scene of a factory dumping waste into a body of water, as a man in a top hat nearby stabs a sperm whale. The bottom of the bottle bears the names of two local electronics manufacturers — Aerovox and Cornell Dubilier — as well as a highly carcinogenic chemical those companies used to coat their electronics with: polychlorinated biphenyl.
“That’s the long name for PCBs, which are the main polluter in New Bedford Harbor,” Slipp said.
The piece mimics the style of traditional scrimshaw to tack a new chapter onto New Bedford’s lore as a famous seaport: shortly after whaling ended in 1924, Aerovox and Cornell Dubilier began dumping PCB-laden waste into the Acushnet River, soiling the harbor that lit colonial America’s lamps, launched Herman Melville on his sole whaling expedition, and evolved into the country’s most lucrative fishing port. Nearly 50 years after the manufacturing of PCBs was banned, New Bedford’s harbor remains an EPA Superfund site that has cost more than $1 billion to clean up so far.
Slipp said the plastic scrimshaw depicting this history casts the traditional pieces around it in a new light: she said it expresses how “human beings have always been on this path to extract what we can from the environment around us for financial gain, oftentimes without a mind to the kind of environmental costs that come along with that sort of industry.”
“Every one of these pieces represents a dead whale,” Slipp continued. “The whaling industry was really significant towards the development of industry, toward being able to light people’s homes and cities. At the same time, the impacts on whale populations were extraordinary.”
Surrounded by traditional scrimshaw, the engine coolant bottle also becomes a reminder that plastic is now as much a part of our ocean as the organic materials the whalers used.
Despite these interesting connections, Slipp said purists are unlikely to consider the engine coolant bottle a real piece of scrimshaw.
“Technically, scrimshaw is strictly defined as work made by whalers on shipboard on the byproducts of whales, or marine mammals in general,” Slipp said.
By those standards, scrimshaw is a lost art that can’t be practiced anymore. The last whaleship left New Bedford almost 100 years ago. Whalebone itself is illegal to buy or sell unless it’s a certified antique. But the artist who scrawled New Bedford’s pollution saga onto an engine coolant bottle said he took care to align himself with tradition by ensuring the piece was made on a boat.
The plastic scrimshander
In the summers, Duke Riley, the artist behind the plastic scrimshaw, lives on a sailboat moored in Narragansett Bay. He leaves behind a large New York City art studio with several full-time assistants to live below deck in the boat’s cramped quarters.
“Why would I sit in a studio all day when I can sit here?” Riley said. “I just get up in the morning and go for a swim, put a fishing rod in the water and then I sit down here and I work till it gets dark.”
Riley, 52, makes a lot of fishing lures here out of toothbrushes, syringes and tampon applicators. His materials are pieces of trash picked up from local beaches, which his team in New York sorts into separate bins for red lighters, blue lighters, green lighters, bread ties, ballpoint pens, and so on.
Riley doesn’t fish for compliments about making an environmental impact through art. In an interview on his boat, he said the process of picking up plastic actually feels Sisyphean. By the time a beach has been cleaned, he said it’s already filling up with plastic again.
But one day while Riley was picking up trash, the inspiration for a new type of scrimshaw washed up at his feet.
“I actually thought I was picking up a piece of bone,” Riley said. “It was a deck brush.”
Riley said the act of engraving a whaling scene onto the deck brush felt instinctual. Growing up in Massachusetts in the 1980s, Riley said he went to a lot of maritime museums with his grandmother. Then, at 10 years old, Riley said he started helping his uncle work as a fish broker in New Bedford, Gloucester, Point Judith and South Boston.
“I think just going to dive bars with my uncle and whatnot, that kind of general aesthetic was sort of everywhere,” Riley said. “That was what I knew art to be.”
In addition to riffing on traditional maritime artforms, another constant in Riley’s work is his use of materials from environments other people often ignore or find repulsive. When Riley attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1990s, he said he lived in the cupola of an old house in Providence, which he shared with a flock of pigeons. Riley said his rent was $25 per month, and that he sourced many of his art supplies from the surrounding roofscape.
“I was trying to use pigeon egg yolk to make the paint,” Riley said. For pigments, he was grinding up brick, “taking green from the, the copper flashing on the roof … and grinding up eggshells to make white and stuff like that.”
After art school, Riley moved to New York City, where he started earning a living as a tattoo artist. He also built up a reputation outside the tattoo parlor as a resourceful artist who hung out by the shore and threw great parties.
In 2006, he built a tavern under a waterfront highway using driftwood. He served the alcohol out of antique glass bottles he’d dug up in the sand.
A year later, Riley built a replica of a wooden submarine used during the Revolutionary War. As he harnessed the shifting tides to ride his egg-shaped vessel toward a British cruise ship, Riley said a current pulled him within 100 feet of the U.S. Coast Guard, who boarded the submarine and arrested him. Riley appeared on the front page of the New York Post the next morning, under the headline, “Sub Moron.” New York City’s police commissioner called it a case of “maritime mischief” as he sought to dispel concerns about a potential terrorism threat.
“I wasn’t actually trying to get caught,” Riley recalled. “But certainly, when I did get caught, and it ended up like all over the international news — uh, yeah, it caught people’s attention more.”
Riley was becoming a legendary badass in the New York art world. The submarine wound up in an art gallery in Chelsea and, within two years, Riley was showing work in museums. He eventually moved into a bigger studio and hired a staff to pursue larger, more intricate art.
For a landmark show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2022, Riley’s team made an 8-by-8-foot mosaic with shells and bits of plastic trash, which Guinness World Records certified as the largest sailor’s valentine in the world. They also made a chandelier out of nip bottles, which they installed inside a colonial home the museum salvaged decades earlier during demolition to make room for a waterfront oil transfer station in Brooklyn.
Selling a single piece to the New Bedford Whaling Museum isn’t a big payday for Riley anymore, or a token of prestige that’ll advance his career. But Riley accepted the commission anyway.
“I was incredibly honored because it was this museum that is probably my favorite museum in the world,” Riley said.
Riley’s ivory-colored engine coolant bottle is now part of the Whaling Museum’s permanent collection, prominently displayed in the center of the scrimshaw gallery.
