{"id":356930,"date":"2026-03-31T14:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T14:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/356930\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T14:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T14:40:10","slug":"ahabs-head-american-vengeance-whitmans-modern-melville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/356930\/","title":{"rendered":"Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance – Whitman’s Modern Melville"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAhab\u2019s Head: American Vengeance,\u201d Heidi Whitman\u2019s hair-raising installation at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, invites that question. and more broadly asks how society reflects the psyches of its leaders.<\/p>\n

Like the book, the exhibit is a hall of mirrors. Whitman elucidates how characters and symbols reflect each other in the intricate, twisting tale. In Melville\u2019s psychological epic, Ahab\u2019s belief that Moby-Dick is purposefully malicious may say more about the captain than the whale, for example. And the descent into chaos of his ship\u2019s crew reflects Ahab\u2019s perilous mental decline.<\/p>\n

The exhibit\u2019s most terrifying mirror is this: Ahab, erratic and driven by his own impetuous emotional needs regardless of those around him, reflects American leadership now. <\/p>\n

The artist doesn\u2019t make that explicit, but the show\u2019s subtitle, \u201cAmerican Vengeance,\u201d implies a certain national DNA. There\u2019s a dictionary definition on the wall: \u201cven\u00b4geance, n. The infliction of pain on another, in return for injury or offense.\u201d <\/p>\n

I spoke with Whitman as she was installing \u201cAhab\u2019s Head\u201d in November. In March, I returned to see the completed show. It\u2019s aptly housed in the museum\u2019s Herman Melville Room and a corridor leading to it. She originally started crafting \u201cAhab\u2019s Head\u201d in 2020, during Trump\u2019s first term. She was thinking about the government. In this term, she said, she sees \u201ca whole new level of vengefulness and retribution.\u201d <\/p>\n

Much of Trump\u2019s ethos appears to revolve around his perceived enemies. He has followed through on his 2024 promise for a campaign of retribution<\/a>, taking legal action against perceived enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, among others. <\/p>\n

\"HeidiHeidi Whitman (b. 1949) Ahab\u2019s Head: American Vengeance (installation), 2020-2025. Ink, gouache, acrylic, paper, canvas, cloth, string, rope, wood, Cinefoil, sound, and cast shadows. Dimensions variable.Julia Featheringill<\/p>\n

Whitman, a Boston artist, has made increasingly nuanced, ambitious, and politically pointed art in recent years. \u201cNew World<\/a>,\u201d her COVID-era installation in \u201cWayfinding\u201d at the Addison Gallery of American Art, was an eviscerating reimagining of colonial history that reckoned with American violence and greed up to the present day.<\/p>\n

She has long worked to chart the mysteries of the mind. In an artist\u2019s statement<\/a>, she calls \u201cMental Maps,\u201d her series of deeply layered and tangled drawings, \u201ccartographies of the subconscious.\u201d They make space for hidden motivations and shadows, obsessions and quirks we cannot discern ourselves. Here, she funnels that approach through \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d and Ahab. The knotty shadows the installation casts on the walls hold as much power as the objects themselves.<\/p>\n

Whitman read a chapter of \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d each day during the pandemic. It\u2019s a beauty and a terror of a book \u2014 I read it in college and recently picked it up again. \u201cAhab\u2019s Head\u201d packs the novel\u2019s operatic scope into a single gallery that resembles the aftermath of a shipwreck. <\/p>\n

\"HeidiHeidi Whitman (b. 1949) Ahab\u2019s Head: American Vengeance (wall detail), 2020-2025. Ink, gouache, acrylic, paper, canvas, cloth, string, rope, wood, Cinefoil, sound, and cast shadows. Dimensions variable.Julia Featheringill<\/p>\n

Even before you get inside, stark, gritty, mostly black-and-white abstract drawings lead forebodingly to the entrance. Weapons from the museum\u2019s collection hang above the door, marking it as a portal to violence. Ominous music by Boston-area musician David Raposo<\/a> plays on a loop daring us to enter. In it, we perceive the low pulse and rush of the whale against increasingly dissonant higher tones that might be Ahab\u2019s own consciousness.<\/p>\n

Inside, giant paper constructions face off on opposite walls, one shaped like a devastated Pequod (or perhaps it\u2019s the whale, or both) dripping with ropes, cobweb-like netting, and dotted with pictures of harpoons and guns \u2013 including present-day automatic weapons, suggesting another national genetic strand. Across the gallery looms Ahab\u2019s head, blood red, scarred with black, pitted with eyes gazing accusingly at us: whale eyes, human eyes, and eyes that might be either. Throughout the gallery, white tangles of rope hang ceiling to floor along with twists of white fabric like torn sails or hastily ripped bandages.<\/p>\n

\"HeidiHeidi Whitman (b. 1949) Ahab\u2019s Head: American Vengeance (head detail), 2020-2025. Ink, gouache, acrylic, paper, canvas, cloth, string, rope, wood, Cinefoil, sound, and cast shadows. Dimensions variable.Julia Featheringill<\/p>\n

Amid the ropes, a single column of red and black fabric cascades between floor and ceiling like the spout of a dying whale. I thought, too, of an oil geyser. Whaling, driven by the Industrial Revolution\u2019s ravening hunger for whale oil, blubber and baleen, was an early extractive industry. That\u2019s another piece of the American DNA Whitman references.<\/p>\n

Maps on the walls, flights of fancy based on charts made by a 19th-century whaling captain named Eber, are marked with Xes, as if we have equated the earth\u2019s resources with some mythical booty indicated on a treasure map. For many, finding such treasure is never enough, or never truly achieved (maybe the 2020 election is Trump\u2019s white whale). Such a hunger can lead to darkness. Melville writes of Ahab, \u201cAnd he piled upon the whale\u2019s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race.\u201d Trump\u2019s social media feed evinces similar ire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"HeidiHeidi Whitman (b. 1949) Ahab\u2019s Head: American Vengeance (installation), 2020-2025. Ink, gouache, acrylic, paper, canvas, cloth, string, rope, wood, Cinefoil, sound, and cast shadows. Dimensions variable.Julia Featheringill<\/p>\n

A treasure, a win, a whale is just a momentary satisfaction; the need for more always comes clawing back. The plunder continues, the resentment, the vengeance. The hollowness inside. Melville, and now Whitman, invite us into the wreckage of that hollowness. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a mirror, not an argument, but the stark vision of \u201cAhab\u2019s Head\u201d will amplify some viewers\u2019 convictions that we must change direction. We must put down our obsessions and our petty resentments, go home without that treasure and instead make peace with our neighbors and families. After all, that\u2019s where the treasure really lies.<\/p>\n

AHAB\u2019S HEAD: American Vengeance, an Installation by Heidi Whitman<\/p>\n

At New Bedford Whaling Museum, 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford, through May 3. www.whalingmuseum.org\/exhibition\/ahabs-head-american-vengeance\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAhab\u2019s Head: American Vengeance,\u201d Heidi Whitman\u2019s hair-raising installation at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, invites that question. and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-356930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}