PEM’s Maritime art collection, which is the finest in the country, frames the sea as an enduring source of opportunity as well as peril, a force that inspires creativity and innovation, and encourages engagement with the wider world. This installation offers a global perspective on our creative response to the sea, from a 17th-century brass Pakistani astrolabe to Valerie Hagerty’s monumental Shipwrecked Armoire with Barnacles (2012) and artworks that reflect Salem’s rich history of maritime trade and exploration. Immersive digital media amplify compelling stories that lay behind unassuming objects, like a calendar stick from 1803 whose carved notches record the long days that Rhode Island native, James Drown, spent shipwrecked and left for dead on Tristan da Cunha, a remote speck island in the South Atlantic.

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