ABOVE IMAGE: PEM’s Executive Director Lynda Roscoe Hartigan in the Fashion and Design gallery with several pairs from the museum’s vast shoe collection. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
While moving through PEM’s galleries, posing for a photographer, Rosario Ubiera-Minaya found herself next to a towering wooden figure.
This temple image, called Kū, was created in Hawai’i by a master carver from the Kānaka Maoli community in the early 19th century, and is beloved by PEM staff and visitors alike. Ubiera-Minaya noticed two museum visitors nearby chatting in Spanish, trying to find their way to the Fashion and Design gallery, expressing concern about missing the important sights along the way.
She quickly engaged the visitors and set them back on their path to the third floor. Navigation was fresh in her mind — the ongoing photoshoot was happening after she’d spent time in a recording studio, narrating a one-hour Spanish tour of PEM.
Ubiera-Minaya’s current role as executive director of Lynn’s Raw Art Works, along with her past experience working at PEM, make her a perfect voice to guide visitors through the museum’s greatest hits on the new PEM in an Hour tour. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Rose-Marie and Eijk von Otterloo Executive Director and CEO, narrates the English version.
As the museum’s Content Producer, I’ve spent years creating audio experiences that allow our visitors to take a deeper dive of PEM in person — or enjoy an armchair experience from home. The PEM Walks series features the historic houses dotted across PEM’s campus, from a tiny shoemaker’s shop to the mansions of Salem merchants. The Salem Witch Trials Walk looks at objects on view that belonged to the accused, accusers and judges of the tragic events of 1692. Finally, I produce and host our podcast, the PEMcast, which brings culturally curious listeners into behind-the-scenes soundscapes and chats with curators and contemporary artists.
PEM’s Manager of Historic Structures and Landscapes, Steven Mallory, and Dinah Cardin record a story about the Pickman House. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
But PEM in an Hour is the first tour that offers a bird’s eye view of our entire holdings. PEM provides an experience that is unique among American art museums, with more than 850,000 works of art and culture in its collection — many of them the first of their kind to be collected in this country.
PEM’s Manager of Historic Structures and Landscapes, Steven Mallory, and Dinah Cardin record a story about the Pickman House. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
The collection includes African, American, Asian Export, Chinese, contemporary, Japanese, Korean, maritime, Native American, Oceanic and South Asian art, as well as architecture, fashion and textiles, photography, natural history specimens and one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. As the country’s oldest continuously operating museum, PEM has an origin story like no other. Its roots date to 1799, with the founding of the East India Marine Society, an organization of Salem ship captains who sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn and brought back objects from their voyages.
Our Visitor Engagement staff often field the deceptively simple question: “What should I see?” Many visitors are only in town for a short time and have a long Salem wishlist. A one-hour audio tour of the museum’s collection highlights packs a much-needed punch.
But how do you break down such a vast global collection? Should you start with the oldest objects and work your way forward in time? Should you circumnavigate the globe, examining objects from each continent, until you make your way back to Salem, just as those founding mariners did? Or, should you highlight the most visually jaw-dropping works, like a 19th-century bed from China, shaped like a full moon and covered in elaborate carvings? We chose a little bit from all of those strategies. The 21 objects on the tour take you all around the museum, with the option to stop and see more along the way.
An exquisite chair (left) made by Salem’s own Nathaniel Gould for the home of America’s first millionaire. The flowers painted on the chair on the right matched the view of the garden from the windows. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
In a world that feels in a constant state of flux, creativity is vitally important. Sparking and sustaining creativity is at the heart of the museum’s new strategic plan, called PEM Forward.
An exquisite chair (left) made by Salem’s own Nathaniel Gould for the home of America’s first millionaire. The flowers painted on the chair on the right matched the view of the garden from the windows. Photo by Kathy Tarantola/PEM.
The whole point of the tour is to discover objects that inspire wonder, provoke questions and even challenge how we see the world and our place in it. We keep inviting people to Salem, to come see a remarkable collection in a museum much larger, older and more significant than a city of 45,000 people might be expected to have in its downtown. Now, there’s a starting point for your explorations.
As the tour says, “engage your senses, reflect on your lived experience and be creatively inspired. The world is complex and ever-changing, but here in PEM’s galleries, you have time to connect, to learn and to feel…to see, and be seen.”
The tour is designed to be taken at your own pace. Ready? Let’s begin.
PEM in an hour will kick off in July. The tour takes approximately one hour and is included with admission. A Wi-Fi enabled device is needed and the use of earbuds or headphones is recommended. Some featured material may not be appropriate for younger audiences. PEM in an Hour is generously supported by the George S. Parker Fund.
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