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      Press Release

      New Installation Honors 200th Anniversary of PEM’s East India Marine Hall

      Released September 18, 2025

      Captivating stories of local and global history told through PEM’s earliest objects opens March 14, 2026

      SALEM, MA – The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States, is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the museum’s first permanent gathering and exhibition space, East India Marine Hall. Built in 1825, East India Marine Hall is the heart of the museum and is recognized today as a National Historic Landmark. Beginning March 14, 2026, visitors will experience a new, multimedia-enhanced installation of the hall featuring several hundred objects that offer a fascinating cross-section of PEM’s global collection and represent its earliest years of collecting.

      By exploring PEM’s origin story with a fresh approach, visitors will gain a nuanced understanding of local and global history while better understanding the museum’s core and originating values: curiosity, inquiry and inspiration. This innovative, yet deeply historic installation utilizes the museum’s founding collections, acquired from 1799 to 1867 by the East India Marine Society, a group of sea captains and traders who sailed all over the world from Salem.

      “Over the last 200 years, East India Marine Hall has been visited by people from all walks of life in the United States and across the globe — from American presidents to foreign travelers to the farmer in the town next door,” said Dan Finamore, PEM’s Deputy Chief Curator and The Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History. “From its inception, this space and these objects, collected by the museum’s seafaring founders, have elicited curiosity and wonder and transported visitors to places around the world.”

      Experiencing the Historic Hall

      Built in 1824–25 by the East India Marine Society, East India Marine Hall was designed by architect Thomas Waldron Sumner in the Greek Revival style. The hall is distinguished by its tall arched windows and the 19th-century ship figureheads that line its walls. It was built using local Cape Ann granite and served as the society’s exhibition hall, as well as the site for long and lavish dinners where members toasted their adventures and shared their stories of ocean voyages beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

      “The hall’s new installation aims to revive the experience of a 19th-century museumgoer who declared ‘to walk around this room was to circumnavigate the globe’,” notes Curator-at-Large George Schwartz. “Visitors will encounter artistic and cultural achievements that stitch connections across time and space while providing a global perspective on what, over the centuries, has made Salem such a distinctive city.”

      Answering the East India Marine Society’s founding call “to form a museum of natural and artificial curiosities,” its members collected flora and fauna, including ostrich eggs and a taxidermied King penguin, and displayed many expressions of cultural identity from around the world. Objects include spears from Fiji, ship models from China, a Māori nose flute, ceremonial kava bowls, the lower jaw of a very large sperm whale and part of the museum’s very first donation: a pipe with two stems that came from the north coast of Sumatra and was gifted by Captain Jonathan Carnes.

      Interactive Storytelling

      “Storytelling is one of the most exciting aspects of the project because we have centuries of commentary, information, background and historical documentation of these objects that we can now bring to the fore through digital media,” said Finamore.

      Alongside boat models, paddles, natural specimens and works of art and culture from around the world, the interactive installation in East India Marine Hall provides in-depth context for the objects on view. Audio and video storytelling gives voice to the words of early collectors, trading partners, visiting historians, journalists and museum visitors — some extracted from records in the museum's vast and meticulously kept archive.

      For example, an Indian palanquin, a hand-carried, wheelless conveyance used to transport a person of import, was gifted to the museum by several ship captains in 1803. Visitors can consider the object from a range of perspectives, from the donors who wanted it to be used in local parades, to the thoughts of a museum visitor in the 19th century, to a contemporary scholar who reflects on traditional Indian practices and provides their own insights.

      PRESS & INFLUENCER RECEPTION
      Please join us for a press and influencer preview reception featuring remarks and a curator-led tour. Invitation to follow.

      SOCIAL MEDIA
      Follow along on social media using #EIMH200

      PUBLICITY IMAGES
      Publicity images available upon request.

      IMAGE CREDITS

      • Michele Felice Cornè and Samuel Bartoll, East India Marine Society Sign, 1803. Oil on canvas. Museum commission, 1803. M235. Peabody Essex Museum.
      • James Henry Emerton, East India Marine Hall as it appeared 1825–67, looking north (reproduction), about 1879. Ink on paper. Museum purchase, 1889. M303.4. Peabody Essex Museum.
      • East India Marine Hall facade, 144 Essex Street, Salem, Mass. About 1866–1875. Peabody Essex Museum 2008 Phillips Library Collection.
      • Probably artist in Indonesia, Two-stem smoking pipe, about 1790. Metal and wood. Gift of Captain Jonathan Carnes, 1799. M18. Peabody Essex Museum.

      SPONSORS
      Major support for this project has been provided by Mr. and Mrs.* Ulf B. Heide, Tim and Joanie Ingraham, Alex Ingraham, and Sam Ingraham. Generous support has been provided by Haven Trust, Mr. and Mrs. James B. Hawkes, Mr. and Mrs. Howard B. Hodgson Jr., Angus and Leslie Littlejohn, Chip and Susan Robie, Mr. and Mrs. Stuart W. Pratt, Katie Huddleson and Alan Kraning, Edward A. Studzinski and Anne G. Studzinski, the Salem Marine Society, and Henry Birdseye Weil and Ann Uppington. Additional support has been provided by The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, Jonathan B. Loring, Walter C. Meibaum III, Jean Verbridge, and Connie and Stan Grayson.

      About the Peabody Essex Museum
      Founded in 1799, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, is the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. PEM provides thought-provoking experiences of the arts, humanities and sciences to celebrate the creative achievements and potential of people across time, place and culture. By connecting people through inquiry, empathy and dialogue, PEM encourages an understanding of our shared humanity and fosters a sense of belonging in a complex, ever-changing world. We build, steward and share our superlative collection, which 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 and one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. PEM offers a varied and unique visitor experience, with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities and performance spaces. The museum’s campus, which offers numerous gardens and green spaces, is an accredited arboretum and features more than a dozen noted historic structures, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese home that is the only example of Chinese domestic architecture in the United States.

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