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 won’t undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“I haven’t seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were asked this week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company’s behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)