Casting A Wider Net showcases the stories of Cape Verdean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran members of New Bedford’s working waterfront in their own words. The exhibit is the culmination of the Casting A Wider Net community oral history project which was developed to collect and share stories of communities of color that have been and continue to be an integral part of New Bedford’s commercial fishing industry. The resulting photographs, recordings, and transcripts will become part of the Center’s archive and the NOAA Voices web-based archive and are the basis for the exhibit. Learn more about the project here. 

The exhibit showcases videos, photographs, and quotes from the oral history interviews as well as links to the full interview transcripts. Visitors have the opportunity to hear the voices of each person who was interviewed, view a scrapbook of photos narrators and their families, and can even write them a message in the exhibit guestbook. 

More exhibit tie-in programs for 2024-2025, including school programs, film screenings, cooking classes, and special presentations, can be found on our Calendar page .

Check out what people are saying about the exhibit on our Press Page!