“While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his (Ahab’s) head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of the lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead … For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul” — Herman Melville,
“Chapter 44, The Chart” Moby-Dick; or The Whale.
In March 2020, as the pandemic descended on the United States, Heidi Whitman began rereading “Moby-Dick, or The Whale.” Reading a chapter a day, she made her way through the book’s 135 chapters, discovering layers of meaning that connected Melville’s book to America’s obsession with vengeance that inspired the work that is now on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The exhibition is being presented just steps away from Seaman’s Bethel. Immortalized in Moby Dick as the “Whaleman’s Chapel,” it is the very church Herman Melville attended in the weeks before departing on the whaling voyage that inspired his book.
“Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance” is a two-part exhibition. Part One is displayed in a corridor filled with complex abstract drawings from Whitman’s “Leviathan” series. The drawings cover the sheets in whites, blacks and greys, all manner of mark-making, and a quiet sense of foreboding. A silhouette of a white whale, ominous clouds of black, scattered images of whale eyes, a view from the prow of a ship and invented maps of ocean voyages line the walls. There are also multi-layered constructions, representing whaling voyages and the diverse members of the crew — all relating to the gallery installation in the next room. Mounted high at the end of the corridor are actual weapons from the museum’s collection. Together, these objects and artworks invite the viewer to pause and reflect on the deeper meanings of the exhibition.
The second part of the exhibition is a single site-specific installation called “Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance” — carrying the same name as the exhibition. The installation fills the entire gallery that is fittingly named the Herman Melville Room.