Amy Sherald, official portrait artist to First Lady Michelle Obama, offers something we don’t always see in museums — black people on a beach.

Sherald’s 2019 painting Precious jewels by the sea offers a contemporary twist on marine painting while depicting four Black teenagers in bathing suits, the deep blue horizon beyond. Two boys stand tall with girls seated on their shoulders. Sherald describes her motivation to make “images of things that we normally do but we don’t get to see in spaces like museums. Like black people going to the beach. . . So it’s really just about creating American narratives about American people — while critiquing it at the same time.”

This summer, visitors to PEM will see that marine painting is so much more than ship portraits. In American Waters combines art history, marine history and even neuroscience as well as a range of artists and artistic expressions, and a more inclusive vision for American marine painting and American art.

“We are casting the net more broadly and incorporating works that are clearly infused with maritime themes, which don't necessarily depict a portrait of a ship of a particular moment in time, but evoke the maritime experience in different ways,” says Dan Finamore, PEM’s Associate Director – Exhibitions and The Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History.

In Theresa Bernstein’s 1923 painting The Immigrants, the artist captures the experience of traveling to America in steerage class in one of the many large ocean liners that arrived in the port of New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Located in the Voyages section of the exhibition, the painting explores how artists codified a vision of significant voyages that helped to define the country’s culture and identity. The journeys of both immigrants and enslaved people were often overshadowed by images of iconic and triumphant naval engagements and commercial ventures.