Just give me a good story and let me go to work.
The museum is the only museum in
the state of Virginia dedicated to contemporary art and so we don't have a
permanent collection here at the museum which is really exciting because it
means we get to work with living contemporary artists.
Wayne White was one
of the 50 artists that was included in a big exhibition we did in 2016.
The more we researched him and got to know him
and the work that he did outside of this
painting we knew that we wanted to offer him a more extensive show.
Every city I go to, I pick a local history to base my installation on.
I was immediately drawn
to the Monitor and Merrimac.
I've loved that story since I was a kid.
When Wayne decided clearly that this was the direction he wanted to go we were all
thrilled but also a little bit nervous because we educate about contemporary
art, which can touch all different kinds of subjects, but we're not historians so
it's important for us to reach out and collaborate with the experts.
I've been a fan of Wayne White from his days in Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
I actually reached out to him and to MOCA and said
what can we do to help you tell your story?
We gave him ship plans, historic images.
He used the plans that we had stored in the NOAA archives to virtually
recreate it and build a little model now that everybody could explore the shipwreck.
It's working with these local partners that can really help tell our
story to the local populace.
I work with different museums, interpret it different ways,
and this is by far probably the coolest way.
So we come through, you feel like you're
walking inside the Monitor.
There's Gideon Welles as Neptune pointing the
way, the future of the Navy with the ironclads.
And you have Ericsson with a
hat and that's the Monitor.
And then you have the caricatures of the different
officers and the crew on board.
It was just natural for me to want to do the
faces of these guys.
Wayne has draped his art over these features and now it's such
a wonderful way to tell their stories
that we weren't able to before .
Mr. Keeler. He was the paymaster of the boat.
He's a very upright citizen, always
watching out and spying on people,
catching them AWOL and stuff like that.
Then there's a sailor holding up
the red distress signal lantern that was flashing.
That's sort of the beginning of the end of the story.
Certainly Wayne got such a reputation that a lot of people have traveled from
far and wide to come and see it, but also people who've never heard of Wayne
before have just found such inspiration in the work and then have gone on to
look at NOAA and the work that you all do, and locally The Mariners' Museum and
sort of wanted to unearth the history that maybe they didn't realize was right
on their doorstep.
These partners we have in the communities,
here at MOCA Virginia Beach or The Mariners' Museum in Newport News,
and several others, it's so critical that we work with them to tell her story because
she is hard to get to. So it's our responsibility working for NOAA's Office
of National Marine Sanctuaries to help bring that wreck site and that story to the people.