The Whaling Museum in Húsavík, together with the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA, recently received a joint grant from the American Alliance of Museums. It is a project fund within the organization called Museums Connect and promotes connecting different cultures through museum cooperation. The press release of the United States Department of State and the American Association of Museums states that in 2015 there will be 15 partner museums, which will form a museum-related youth exchange with a focus on environmental and social change.
The project of the Whaling Museum and the Whaling Museum is for one year and aims to connect different communities that have a common relationship with whales and whale-related culture. During America's peak whaling years, the city of New Bedford was called 'the city that lit up the world', then mainly because of the hunting of sperm whales, which were best known for the processing of fish oil for lighting. The last whaling boat left port in New Bedford in 1927, by which time electricity had made its way as a modern source of light. New Bedford residents are proud of their heritage, and the city is a clear testament to that, but the community is also a culturally diverse community, with whalers from Portugal and the Azores settling in the New England region during the boom years of whaling.
The history of Húsavík's whaling culture is much younger and of a different nature, but nevertheless it is considered extremely remarkable, especially the rapid development in whale watching at the same time as Icelanders continue whaling. In addition, Húsavík was for a long time the only town in Iceland that featured a museum dedicated to educating about whales and whale culture.
The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Youth Center Tún á Húsavík, and young people in each place will be in the foreground. A group of young people aged 15-18 from Húsavík on the one hand and New Bedford on the other will form a working group ('Ocean Crew'). In addition to receiving education about whales, biology and ocean ecology, the group will introduce themselves and their background to each other, learn about the history of the two communities and introduce it to each other, introduce the main landmarks of their fellow townsmen and tell about the lives of the young people in each place separately. The students will host events such as a children's reading marathon, a family-oriented Whale Day, as well as maintaining a project website that will publish the students' digital presentations. The project is divided into three parts; introduction to participants, local environment, museums and interesting facts and ideals; joint projects and public presentations for the public in the museums; and finally travel, where the young people get to meet and spend time together, after having known each other for almost a year.
According to Huldar Hafliðadóttir, project manager of the Whale Museum, who is also managing the project on behalf of the museum, this is a great honor for the museum and a lot of work and process that has taken place before this nomination. The collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum actually started in earnest this fall, but the idea was born during a trip to the east coast of the United States a little over a year ago, when a group of 9 people from Iceland visited the museum, as well as visiting other museums, institutions and whale watching parties for sponsored by the US Department of State through the US Embassy in Iceland.
The project received the highest possible recommendation from the American Embassy in Iceland, and the Mayor of New Bedford issued a statement of support for it.
As mentioned earlier, the staff of the Whale Museum are proud of this honor, but only 7 collaborative projects and 15 museums received grants in this eighth year of operation of the project fund. Then Huld will head to Washington DC in September for a conference organized by the American Association of Museums, in addition to which she will meet with representatives of the project at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. In August, young people from Borgarhól School in Húsavík will be given the opportunity to apply for participation in the project, which will be announced later.
More information can be found in the press release of the US Department of State and the American Association of Museums here og here
