I love walkable cities, places where the past feels palpable, and any destination where the air smacks of salt. So I was excited for this spring’s long-awaited completion of the South Coast Rail project, which after a sixty-year gap has reconnected Boston with New Bedford, a city of 100,000 with one of the country’s busiest working waterfronts and a dynamic arts scene to match. In fact, art greets you the moment you step off the Commuter Rail. New Bedford artist Tracy Silva Barbosa’s installation Equinox (2024) envelops the elevator that rises from the parking lot to the pedestrian bridge in a tower of glass, each panel printed with ceramic ink designs evoking one of the four seasons—autumn leaves aflame, bare branches in frosty blue. It’s a fitting marker for a city once famed as the country’s art glass capital and a reminder that public infrastructure can be beautiful.
Cross that bridge over Rt. 18 and you’re just a fifteen-minute walk from downtown, where seagulls swoop over cobblestones and cultural destinations await around practically every corner. Galleries include Gallery X, a contemporary co-op in an 1835 church that hosts film screenings, live music, and exhibitions. On view now is “Ship Shape II,” featuring works inspired by the Ernestina-Morrissey, an 1894 schooner that served as a fishing vessel, carried Arctic explorers, shipped supplies in World War II, and transported immigrants and cargo from Cape Verde before becoming a national landmark and floating classroom that calls New Bedford its homeport.
As for museums, there’s the New Bedford Art Museum, housed in a former bank building (with the vault doors to prove it) and slated to double its exhibition space next year. June brings two summer exhibitions marking the museum’s thirtieth anniversary and showcasing South Coast artists past and present. A group show juried by MFA Boston’s curator of contemporary art, Carmen Hermo, includes artists like Anis Beigzadeh, a ceramicist who often reinterprets traditional motifs from Persian art. Just down the street is the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where you can crawl into the vena cava of a life-size model of a blue whale heart, climb aboard a half-scale whaling ship, and scope out the world’s largest collection of scrimshaw. But the museum covers many other aspects of local history, from New Bedford’s glassmaking and textile industries to the lives of abolitionists and immigrants who shaped the city. It hosts contemporary art, too. Admission is always free for the first-floor local artist showcase, and further inside are exhibitions like “Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art,” opening June 13 and spanning sculpture, fiber arts, mixed media, painting, poetry, and video installation.
New Bedford’s public art scene punches way above its weight, in no small part thanks to the Massachusetts Design, Art, and Technology Institute, better known as DATMA, a nonprofit that works with artists from all over while grounding its programming with a strong sense of place. Among the works on view now are Lisbon-based artist Bordalo II’s Plastic Rooster (2024). Perched on Union Street, it’s a symbol of Portuguese culture—in a city where more than a third of residents claim Portuguese ancestry—and assembled from discarded materials atop a framework built by metal fabrication students at the Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School. Stay tuned for June, when DATMA’s Pride installation will cover the facade of City Hall with sail cloth panels painted and personalized by community members.
On the second Thursday of each month, all of the organizations above and sixty other community partners team up for AHA! Night, an evening of free cultural programming celebrating art, history, and architecture. Needless to say, whether you come for AHA!, a day trip, or a weekend stay, there’s a lot to see and do—and many local artists to discover. I asked a few who know the city well what they’d recommend to a friend paying a visit to New Bedford. Read on for their picks of galleries, good eats, music musts, and more.
