Arts and Culture
The island is well known as a center for both visual and performing arts.
Nantucket has several world-class museums, including the Maria Mitchell Association and the Whaling Museum.
Nantucket has a high concentration of artists and galleries, and have created an ongoing art colony since at least the 1920s. They have come over the decades to capture on canvas and in other media the natural beauty of the landscape, the seascapes, the flora and the fauna. On Friday evenings during the summer season, many of its galleries have open houses and special exhibits. Notable artists who have lived on, or painted in, Nantucket include Frank Swift Chase and Theodore Robinson.
Numerous authors followed the influx of specialists in the visual arts. Well-known writers who are or were residents of Nantucket include Herman Melville.
Music and theater are well represented in Nantucket as well.
Willie Wright wrote much of his 1977 LP, Telling The Truth, while living on the island over the winter of 1976. The album's opening track was "Nantucket Island," which according to The Numero Group's liner notes, "was a tribute and dedication to this new found home and the greatest fans he'd ever known."
The 1990s sitcom, Wings—a series about a fictional airline serving the airport, depicted life on Nantucket at the fictional "Tom Nevers Field" and other locations, portrayed by actual sites on the island.
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Famous quotes containing the words arts and, arts and/or culture:
“I should say that the most prominent scientific men of our country, and perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts and not pure science, or are performing faithful but quite subordinate labors in particular departments. They make no steady and systematic approaches to the central fact.... There is wanting constant and accurate observation with enough of theory to direct and discipline it. But, above all, there is wanting genius.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)