The 50th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Print Collectors Society will take place in New Bedford, Massachusetts from June 9th through June 11th, 2026. The program will include a day trip to Nantucket Island and an optional session on June 8th at the Heritage Museum in Sandwich, where the AHPCS held its first annual meeting in 1975. The first two days will be spent at the New Bedford Whaling Museum exploring the museum’s rich collections documenting the region’s culture and history. A series of lectures will include talks on whaling and maritime prints, print-related scrimshaw, prints illustrating Melville’s Moby Dick, and the etchings by local artists R. Swain Gifford and LeRoy Yale. Curator-led tours will focus on the prints on view in the museum’s galleries and provide access to additional prints in the museum’s Research Room. Walking tours will visit historic sites in the city including the Seamen’s Bethel, the Mariners’ Home, the Customs House, and the New Bedford Public Library. Thursday will feature a trip to Nantucket Island for a curator-led tour of the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Optional afternoon activities include a historic walking tour of the town or a bus tour of historic sites on the island.

Program

June 9, Tuesday

Welcome and opening session with three talks in the morning and the historic walking tour of New Bedford in the afternoon. Lunch in the Harborview Room at the Whaling Museum. There will be a cocktail reception in the Lagoda Gallery followed by a buffet dinner in the Harborview Room.

09:00 a.m. — Doors Open, Whaling Museum

09:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. — Welcome and Talks, Cook Memorial Theater

Robert Newman, “American and European Whaling Prints: A Dealer’s Perspective”
Marina Wells, “‘A Person of no Ordinary Nerve’: Whalemen and 19th-Century Whaling Prints”
Jim Brust, “Ladies Fashion Plates and Other Illustrations Used for Scrimshaw”

12:30-01:30 p.m. — Lunch, Harbor View Gallery

01:30-04:30 p.m. – Historic walking tours of New Bedford

05:00-06:30 p.m. — Cocktail Reception, Lagoda Gallery

06:30-08:30 p.m. — Dinner, Harbor View Gallery

June 10, Wednesday

The morning session will include the AHPCS annual business meeting and three talks followed by curator-led tours of the galleries and behind-the-scenes access to additional prints and print-related artifacts in the afternoon. The Print Mart and buffet dinner will take place in the Sea Loft, a historic commercial building on the waterfront.

09:00 a.m. — Doors Open, Whaling Museum

09:15-10:00 a.m. — AHPCS Business Meeting, Cook Memorial Theater

10:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m. — Talks, Cook Memorial Theater

Caroline Sloat, “Becoming Old Ironsides: Prints that illustrate the USS Constitution”
David Wright, “R. Swain Gifford and Leroy Yale: Key Players in the Painter-Etcher Movement”
Maryanne Garbowsky, “Moby Dick: Caught in Print”

12:30-01:30 p.m. — Lunch, Harbor View Gallery

01:30-04:30 p.m. — Curator-led gallery tours and behind-the-scenes access to additional prints

05:00-06:00 p.m. — Open Bar and Print Mart, Sea Loft, Waypoint Event Center

06:00-08:00 p.m. — Dinner, Sea Loft, Waypoint Event Center

June 11, Thursday

On Thursday, we will take the Seastreak Ferry to Nantucket Island for a curator-led tour of the Nantucket Whaling Museum, followed by lunch on your own in one of Nantucket’s many restaurants. Optional afternoon activities include a historic walking tour of the town or a historic bus tour of the island. Have dinner on your own after we return to New Bedford, or sign up for a small-group dinner at a nearby restaurant.

08:45-10:45 a.m. – Seastreak Ferry to Nantucket Island

11:00 a.m.-01:00 p.m. – Curator-led tour, Nantucket Whaling Museum

01:00-02:00 p.m. – Lunch

02:00-04:00 p.m. – Free Time; optional activities: Historic Walking Tour or Historic Bus Tour (02:00-03:30 p.m.)

04:15-06:20 p.m. – Seastreak Ferry to New Bedford

06:45, 07:30 p.m. – Optional small group dinners

Speakers

Jim Brust, “Ladies Fashion Plates and Other Illustrations Used for Scrimshaw”
Dr. James S. Brust is a psychiatrist in private practice in San Pedro, California, with an M.D. From the Boston University School of Medicine. He is a collector and researcher whose interests include Currier & Ives and western historical photographs, maps, and manuscripts. He is a co-author of Where Custer Fell: Photographs of the Little Bighorn Battlefield Then and Now (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). His talk on scrimshaw is based on an article he wrote with the late Jack Chang, a pediatric surgeon and founding medical staff member of the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Chang published over eighty articles on medicine, medical history, and scrimshaw and was the recipient of the 2010 L. Byrne Waterman Award of the New Bedford Whaling Museum for “contributions to the application of critical methodologies to art historical research”.
Maryanne Garbowsky, “Moby Dick: Caught in Print”
Dr. Maryanne Garbowsky is a writer and a retired Professor of English. She has written two books on the poet Emily Dickinson (The House Without the Door and Double Vision) as well as numerous articles on the poet. Her specialty is interdisciplinary study, joining the fields of art and literature. She is a contributing editor for the New York Print Club newsletter and an art editor for the Emily Dickinson International Society bulletin. She has written articles that have been published in the New York Times as well as in The Journal of the Print World as well for the AHPCS newsletter. She has had a keen interest in Melville’s novel Moby Dick since she read and taught the novel. Combining her love of words with her love of art made her research of the various illustrations that were created for Moby Dick a joy.
Robert Newman, “American and European Whaling Prints: A Dealer’s Perspective”
Robert Newman is a researcher, cataloger, and third-generation owner of The Old Print Shop in New York City. He started working with his father, Kenneth M. Newman, in 1972 and joined the staff full-time after graduating from college in 1979. His personal interests include early American imprints, and along with his brother, Harry, he has been one of the leading promoters of this period of American art. Since 1990, he has been the primary editor of the Old Print Shop’s publication Portfolio. He has served on the board of the International Fine Print Dealers Association, and helped found the IFPDA Foundation, the gifting arm of the International Fine Print Dealers Association. He has been chairman of the IFPDA Print Fair committee for 18 years and ran the Capital Art Fair in Washington, DC, until 2016. He is a past president of the American Historical Print Collectors Society, and currently serves as the Society’s Treasurer.
Caroline Sloat, “Becoming Old Ironsides: Prints that illustrate the USS Constitution”
Caroline Sloat is the current editor of Imprint, The Journal of American Historical Print Collectors Society. Now a freelance editor and writer, she retired from the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), where she edited books and journals following many years in a similar role at Old Sturbridge Village. Her interest in the USS Constitution emerged while working with late Kitty Keller on an edition of the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads at AAS. She published a discussion of the texts relating to naval battles, “Huzza for the American Navy”: The Sea Battles of the War of 1812 in Song and Verse,” in the Proceedings of the 2016 Dublin Seminar. Because questions about the visual elements remained, the maritime theme of the 2026 AHPCS meeting was an invitation to explore them–and join colleagues of visual culture for whom the work of prints is central to telling the American story.
Marina Wells, “’A Person of no Ordinary Nerve’: Whalemen and 19th-Century Whaling Prints”
Dr. Marina Dawn Wells is Assistant Curator of History and Culture at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Marina holds a doctorate in American Studies from Boston University and has held fellowships at the Winterthur Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Nantucket Historical Association. At New Bedford, Marina has curated an exhibition of coastal photography entitled Reflections; an exhibition of prints and paintings named “Entangled in the Lines”: Figuring Moby-Dick; and “Look pleasant, please”: Early Photo Portraiture in New Bedford, which is on view through September 7, 2026. The American Historical Print Collectors Society awarded Marina the 2025 Lois W. Newman Essay Award for the article “Printing Whaling Masculinity in A Shoal of Sperm Whales”.

David Wright, “R. Swain Gifford and Leroy Yale: Key Players in the Painter-Etcher Movement”
An architect by profession, with a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, David Wright has spent close to thirty years researching the lives and work of the American painter-etchers of the last third of the nineteenth century. In addition to books on historic architecture, he has written extensively on the etchings of Robert Swain Gifford, Emily Kelley Moran, Mary Nimmo Moran, Thomas Moran, Stephen Parrish, and Stephen Ferris. In 2010 he published a two-volume work on Peter Moran, Domestic and Wild: Peter Moran’s Images of America, which received the Ewell L. Newman Book Award from the AHPCS in 2011. He is donating his collection of 1200 prints, 200 books and research materials related to the American painter-etcher movement to the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Location
New Bedford, Massachusetts, New Bedford Whaling Museum, 8 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford, MA 02740

Registration and Contact
Early registration is now open. The registration deadline is May 1, 2026. For more information go to https://ahpcs.org/newbedford.
Membership in the AHPCS is not required, but If you are not already a member of the AHPCS, please consider joining. Membership fees begin at $50. If you’re unable to come for the full three days, a special one-day rate of $100 includes admission to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the morning lecture program, and other activities at the Whaling Museum. Meals are available for an extra charge.
For more information, please contact Nancy Finlay (nfinlayoutlook.com).