New Art of Navigation Exhibit Opens Summer 2024
The Maritime Museum of San Diego is pleased to announce the opening of the new Art of Navigation exhibit this summer in the Gould Eddy Gallery found aboard the 1898 Victorian – era steam ferryboat Berkeley. Entry to the new exhibit is included with general admission. Art of Navigation draws upon some of the finest and most beautiful examples of period instruments, charts, and voyage accounts, illuminated by the work of documentary maritime artist Gordon Miller. The showcase is embellished by exquisite models of the storied ships which conducted the enterprise from the Museum’s own collections, and even majestic full-scale operational versions such as the galleon San Salvador, man-of-war H.M.S. Surprise, schooner Californian, and the Maritime Museum of San Diego flagship Star of India, veteran of twenty-one navigations around the earth.
According to Raymond Ashley, Ph.D., K.C.I., president/CEO of the Maritime Museum of San Diego “As a powerful and mysterious art, navigation and the territorial claims of trade and empire it conveyed drew much of its authority and mastery from the same aesthetic as did all art. In consequence, the instruments, reference texts, and nautical charts which were its tools and products were therefore also objects of exquisite beauty.”
Art of Navigation highlights artifacts used when the great voyages of European exploration began in the mid-sixteenth century at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, oceanic navigation was one of the rare disciplines (along with military and mining engineering), in which mathematics and instruments found tangible and useful application. Even among many of the foremost scientists of that time, mathematics and instruments were thought to be impediments or distortions of the pure reliance on human observation that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle had argued as the basis for scientific investigation.?
The Maritime Museum of San Diego is open daily at Star of India wharf located at 1492 N. Harbor Drive between Grape and Ash Street. For more information, visit Sdmaritime.org.
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