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A museum in Massachusetts has the largest scrimshaw collection in the world. Scrimshaw is artwork made from the bones of marine mammals. But this year, the gallery acquired a piece by an artist who bends the rules of this tradition. From NPR's member station in Rhode Island, The Public's Radio, reporter Ben Berke has the story.
NAOMI SLIPP: There's musical instruments. There's clocks. There's, you know, miniature dressers. There's jewelry boxes.
BEN BERKE, BYLINE: New Bedford Whaling Museum curator Naomi Slipp says these delicate items were made by tough sailors with bones left over from the whales they butchered. But as old Yankee families passed their scrimshaw down through the generations and wealthy collectors like John F. Kennedy started buying it, the art form took on elite connotations. That's why it feels subversive when you see the latest piece Slipp displayed in the gallery.
SLIPP: Framed in this kind of decorative frame is a scene of a factory with a pipeline dropping what we would assume to be kind of pollution or waste into the water.
BERKE: It's etched on a plastic bottle of engine coolant, painted and waxed to look like bone. The words polychlorinated biphenyl written in old script underscore the illustration.
SLIPP: That's the long name for PCBs, which are the main polluter in New Bedford Harbor.
BERKE: About 20 years after the last whale ship left New Bedford, two electronics manufacturers started dumping carcinogenic waste into the local river, turning the harbor where Moby Dick begins into a Superfund site the EPA is still cleaning up. Slipp says purists wouldn't consider this real scrimshaw.
SLIPP: Technically, Scrimshaw is strictly defined as work made by whalers on shipboard on the byproducts of whales or marine mammals in general.
DUKE RILEY: Yeah. I mean, you know...
BERKE: Duke Riley is the artist who made the plastic scrimshaw. He says he honors this tradition by using waste materials found at sea and decorating them inside the cramped quarters of a sailboat on Narragansett Bay.
RILEY: You know, I just get up in the morning. I go for a swim, put a fishing rod in the water, and then I sit down here, and I work till it gets dark, and that's it.
BERKE: Duke sources his art materials from the endless tide of plastic trash landing on the beaches. He says converting tampon applicators and ballpoint pens into maritime art is like second nature to him. The inspiration for his plastic scrimshaw literally washed up at its feet one day.
RILEY: I found a piece of plastic on the beach that I - when I went to go pick it up, I actually thought I was picking up a piece of bone. It was a deck brush.
BERKE: Duke is a legend in the New York art world. He once built a replica of a submarine used in the Revolutionary War, which he rode around the harbor until the Coast Guard seized it and arrested him. By comparison, landing a piece at the New Bedford Whaling Museum isn't a big career achievement anymore. But Duke says his work belongs here.
RILEY: I was incredibly honored, you know, 'cause it was this, you know, museum that I - is my favorite museum in the world, you know?
BERKE: Duke's ivy-colored engine coolant bottle is part of the museum's permanent collection now. Surrounded by whale bone, it takes on a clearer meaning, reminding us that today, plastic is as much a part of our ocean as organic materials. For NPR News, I'm Ben Berke in New Bedford, Mass. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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