There were many photographs and videos taken of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after a container ship struck one of its piers on the night of March 26, 2024, causing portions of the bridge to collapse and making the Patapsco River in Baltimore unusable for shipping for a period of weeks. Most of those photographs and videos were taken by helicopters and drones from above. One photograph, however, was taken by a Coast Guard petty officer from the vantage point of a boat on the water, looking up at the container ship and the broken metal girders from the bridge still resting on the vessel. Between the photographer and the damaged bridge and ship is a Coast Guard forty-five-foot responder boat, probably surveying the damage and perhaps also looking for survivors. Whatever the crew members of the boat were doing, they were doing the job of the Coast Guard, which in this case was helping to keep people safe in ports and other waterways.
Don Hatcher, a technical illustrator and land-and-seascape painter living in Newport, Washington, used that photograph as the basis for his gouache painting Assessing the Key Bridge Collapse, which is included in this year’s exhibition of new artworks accepted into the Coast Guard Art Program’s collection, held at New York Salmagundi Club (47 Fifth Avenue), July 1 to July 29. This is the forty-fourth year that artworks from the Coast Guard’s collection have been exhibited at the Salmagundi Club, with this particular display including thirty-four artworks (drawings and paintings) by twenty-four artists.
Before we get into this exhibition, a little background: all five branches of the U.S. military have art collections. The Army has the largest collection, with 12,000-plus pieces, that began during World War I, while the Navy’s collection numbers around 20,000 works, the Marine Corps’ collection includes over 11,000 pieces and the Air Force’s collection hovers around 9,000 works. The Coast Guard is the most recent to join this group, having begun its art program in 1971 and currently holding 2,300 works.
The Coast Guard makes a larger effort than other branches of the military to display its artworks. The Marine Corps, for instance, displays pieces in a room at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, and the Army’s collection is almost entirely in storage at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, while the Air Force Art Program, which started up in 1951, is viewable primarily through the Air Force’s website.
The Coast Guard, like all the other branches of the U.S. military, doesn’t commission artworks and doesn’t pay artists for their work. The artists, most of whom did not serve in the Coast Guard or any other branch of the military, submit images to a jurying panel of the Coast Guard’s art program, which judges them for quality and accuracy. “All works have to be 100 percent accurate, which means what you yourself saw and sketched at the time or took a photograph of or based on a photograph that appeared in a newspaper or magazine,” said Mary Ann Bader, the coordinator of the art program. Hatcher himself noted that one sharp-eyed juror noticed that the submission he had sent to the art program had failed to include the number on the responder boat—all Coast Guard ships and boats are numbered on the right bow—requiring him to add the correct number if he wanted his image to be considered and accepted.
The other criterion for acceptance into the collection, she noted, is that the artworks all must “reflect the mission of the Coast Guard.” That mission has a number of components, from interdicting drug traffickers, search-and-rescue operations, and preventing sabotage and terrorism along the nation’s coastline, to protecting marine habitats, breaking ice in the Great Lakes, and conducting safety inspections of boats. Most of the work of the Coast Guard is not glamorous, the stuff of Hollywood movies, and the subjects of the art collections in all five branches of the U.S. military largely reveal less dramatic, day-to-day life. Assessing the Key Bridge Collapse offers a glimpse of a routine activity by a Coast Guard boat in the context of a calamitous event.
The exhibition includes some more dramatic images, such as Leendert van der Pool’s oil painting Daring Rescue, which shows a helicopter rescue of a man and his dog after the man’s vessel became disabled off Sanibel Island on Florida’s west coast. The viewer is at the water level, discerning the boater and his dog readied to be hoisted up to the partially seen helicopter above with a Coast Guard cutter (again, partially glimpsed) at some distance in the background. Another oil painting, Operation Vigilant Sentry by Michael Davis, focuses on crew members of a Coast Guard vessel taking into custody migrants seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.
Others feature more mundane subjects, such as Ken Stetz’s oil painting of a rescue swimming team’s training session when dealing with rip currents, Heading into the Rip, and Thomas Plantz’s watercolor Firearms Training that shows Coast Guard active-duty members taking target practice. Perhaps one of the most intriguing works in the exhibition is Debra Keirce’s oil Tight Squeeze, which reveals service members replacing fuel filters down in the engine room and working in an extremely limited space. There is a surreal quality to the image, as the seaman looks small behind the large buckets and pipes in the forefront, and we are reminded that this image was based on a photograph, which does distort sizes.
Keirce has no immediate ties to the military and only learned of the Coast Guard Art Program because of an email from the Salmagundi Club that informed member artists that the Coast Guard has a growing collection and is looking for submissions. That email likely came from Karen Loew, a long-time club member and current committee chair of the art program. The other branches of the U.S. military have had more active-duty members who contributed artworks to their collections, but not so much the Coast Guard. “It’s difficult to find art supplies while on a ship,” Loew said, “and there isn’t a lot of space to work in. Also, there is a time constraint, because you’re busy all the time.”
Loew, who has donated thirty works—drawings, pastels and oils—to the Coast Guard, has one piece in this year’s exhibition, an oil painting titled A Rescue Swimmer on Mission, which doesn’t show the persons being rescued, just the rescue swimmer dangling from a line that is lowering him into the water from a helicopter above. Like Keirce’s Tight Squeeze, Loew’s work reflects the distortion that a camera lens creates in a foreground and background. Accuracy to the photograph is paramount in this art. “I tell people who want to submit works for review by the Coast Guard, the details have to be accurate. It’s not all about you. Don’t go getting all creative.”
