The Matter of Memory
April 1- November 3, 2024
The role of museums as both guardians and creators of individual and community memory
Programs, Events, & Lectures
Events are being added all the time! Please check back in for updates.
Exhibition Programs
Connect with Portsmouth and our local community through the collection or workshops, lectures, and community conversations we have planned this season.
Exhibition open seven days
10:00am–5:00pm
Museums, by their very nature as repositories and preservers of collections of objects, are vessels of individual and community memory. These same museums, consciously and unconsciously, are active participants in shaping our understanding of history.
What histories do we choose to examine and to share, both as a museum and as a community? Whose stories do we establish, legitimize, and perpetuate through the things we save and display? Can our collective memories bind us together or can our interpretation of history be manipulated to distort the past and keep us apart?
This exhibition encourages visitors to look at how the items we preserve are tools for shaping how we remember the past.
IN MEMORIAM
It is a basic part of the human experience to honor and remember “the unfortunate dead” through customs, rituals, and practices that have evolved constantly over time. While the rituals and traditions surrounding death and mourning may have changed over the past few centuries, the motivations behind these historical customs remain familiar: to keep those we’ve lost present in our lives and memories.
WHOSE PAST?
The collection of the Historical Society, gathered largely through gifts over the past century, consists primarily of domestic goods representing Portsmouth’s dominant white families of Anglo-American descent. Like most cities and towns, however, Portsmouth has been and continues to be home to many communities who often have been overlooked or undervalued—Native Americans, African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants from central and southern Europe and elsewhere, and many others.
MEMENTOS AND RELICS
Since ancient Rome, the gathering of souvenirs has been a significant part of a traveler’s experience. Derived from the Latin subvenire (“occur to the mind”) and the French (“remember”), souvenirs provide a tangible means after one has returned home of recalling journeys and trips and reliving them (perhaps with pleasure) in the mind.
ICONS OF CONTINUITY
Objects passed down from generation to generation are known to some sociologists as “icons of continuity,” or more commonly, as heirlooms. How these items preserve and conjure up family memories is independent of the nature of the object itself. An everyday, humble object can be as evocative of previous generations as any grand or luxurious masterpiece. The context, associations, and history of the piece count as much, or more, than the intrinsic qualities of the given object.
THE INVENTION AND MAINTENENCE OF TRADITIONS
History museums, in this country, have often sought objects associated with significant figures in American history. These objects help establish and perpetuate the memory of figures deemed to be important and, in a positive sense, contribute to a shared sense of cultural literacy. In a negative sense, they also help elevate a highly selective group of individuals, particularly “great white men.”
In the upstairs gallery
Contemporary works of art by members of the New Hampshire Art Association exploring wide-ranging themes of memory and remembrance in the visual arts.
- What histories do we choose to examine and to share?
- What stories do we consciously or unconsciously create and perpetuate through the things we save, display, and record?
- How is contemporary society changing our view and interpretation of the past and the role memory plays?
- Can our collective memory bind us together or can our history be manipulated to distort the past and keep us apart?
NHAA Award Winners
This companion exhibition includes works of art that are, in diverse ways, creative contemporary responses to the themes of individual and collective memory, remembrance, the interpretation and evocation of the past, and other themes examined from an historical perspective in the first-floor exhibition.
Each of the more than fifty works by forty-one artists on display is therefore, in its own way, the artist’s meditation on an aspect of memory writ large. Paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, and other media are included, reflecting many of the various techniques in use today. They were selected by members of the Portsmouth Historical Society staff from a large body of submissions solicited from members of the New Hampshire Art Association and other regional artists.
Special thanks to the Puddledock Restaurant for providing the prize money for the top three winners.
Honorable Mentions
Krysten Marche
Stay
This quiet and reflective work directly confronts death and feelings of loss. There are no figures or animals depicted in the scene, but there is evidence of the daily ritual of going for walks. This painting draws you in with the nearly monochromatic palette and leaves you with a solitary and haunting feeling.
This also serves as a reminder that the prosaic, intrinsic qualities of the actual object―a dog dish, a collar, and a leash, or a hanging garment―are divorced from the power of said object to evoke memories and create threads of continuity.
Krysten Marche, Stay. Acrylic on canvas, 2024. $1,200
David Random
Picturing the Past, A Stitch in Time, and Innings of History
Each of these three assemblages, in its own way, is a compartmentalized memory palace devoted to a single subject, including baseball, hand sewing, and photography. As such, each evokes and encapsulates memories of people, products, processes, and activities in miniature.
These pieces highlight the fascination inspired by the past and remind us that memories and art can be lighthearted and whimsical.
Thomas Berger
Early Riches
This bold, beautifully carved image of a codfish depicts a key staple of the local Seacoast economy for much of the colonial period. Today, overfishing has had a deleterious effect on the cod population, reducing it dramatically in quantity and threatening its existence in some waters. Mounted on a box labeled for molasses, the work also relates to the section of the downstairs exhibition devoted to looking at objects with a different perspective and remembering often overlooked aspects of their being, in this case the production of sugar through the work of enslaved people in the West Indies and elsewhere.
Thomas Berger, Early Riches. Granite, gold leaf, black stone inlay on wood, 2024. $5,200.
Jillian Vaccaro
Sweet Dreams
Making use of the artist’s childhood bedding and said to be autobiographical in nature, this dramatic work is a veritable rending of garments of Biblical proportions, opening up avenues of interpretation and memory that often revolve around personal issues of loss and mourning, as well as growth and experience.
Jillian Vaccaro, Sweet Dreams. My childhood bedding, acrylic, pastel, and marker on canvas, 2022. $6,850
Third Place
Maya Michaud
Truthful Reminiscense
This compelling portrait is of a young woman, hand to her cheek, apparently lost in thought. Upon close examination, its composition includes fragments of newsprint and the written word, underscoring the significance of documents in creating and sustaining memories writ large, whether truthful (as suggested here) or not.
Maya Michaud, Truthful Reminiscense. Acrylic and mixed media on paper, 2022. $645
Second Place
Diane St. Jean
Wedding Day, 1924
So many families that immigrated to the US in recent generations have little besides photographs to remember their ancestors. Diane St. Jean’s linocuts are a celebration of those treasured, tiny, black-and-white photographs, evoking, with their symbols and patterns, a wealth of history and stories on a single page.
Based on a family photograph, this strong linocut portrait of a young woman (the artist’s grandmother) depicts a stylishly dressed woman of the 1920s on her wedding day, with a fashionable cloche hat, bobbed hairstyle, and substantial bouquet of flowers. In addition to this straightforward portrait, the woman is encircled by floating babies, orbs, maybe even peacock feathers, and other enigmatic imagery that may reflect the woman’s past or future.
First Place
Rhonda Besaw
The Strength of the Nation Lies with the Women—we remember
Using traditional materials and techniques in a contemporary manner, the artist created here a stunning work that also carries a modern, timely, message. In addition, it reminds us that, as noted in the downstairs exhibition, the art and culture of the Native Americans of New England are often overlooked in local history while also demonstrating that Native Americans are very much still with us.
Rhonda Besaw, The Strength of the Nation Lies with the Women —we remember.Glass beads, wool, 2023. $950
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