Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance
New Bedford Whaling Museum
Center Street Gallery
December 13, 2025-May 3, 2026
Boston-area mixed-media artist Heidi Whitman (b. 1949) is fascinated with obsession. For over five years Whitman has been immersed in an artistic project that aims to capture the dread and obsession underlying Herman Melville’s iconic literary work Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851). In March of 2020, Whitman reread Melville’s classic novel, one chapter a day. In her re-reading, she found connections between violence and mania in the novel and the relentless fixation on vengeance in America today. These two passages in Chapters 44 and 135 especially resonated with Whitman:
"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, til 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.…”
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides;
then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or the Whale
In Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance, a new installation work created for the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Whitman seeks to capture Ahab’s madness and the ominous feeling of dread and inevitable violence that pervades the novel. In this work, Whitman encourages visitors to reflect on how these themes are also mirrored in American society. Hanging sculptural forms made from rope and fabric cast shadows on wall-drawn charts depicting fictitious whaling voyages. Two giant assemblages, one inspired by Ahab and Moby-Dick and the other of the destruction of the ship, the Pequod. Together with a newly created soundscape and weaponry from the Museum collection, Ahab’s Head will place visitors at the center of Ahab’s obsession and offer a meditation on violence in the world of Moby-Dick and beyond.
Artist Statement
“In March 2020 I reread Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, one chapter a day. The dread and obsession in this great novel of whaling and the ocean echoed how I felt at that time in the pandemic. My installation, Ahab’s Head: American Vengeance, in referring to Moby-Dick, addresses the relentless American obsession with violence. White ropes and string hanging throughout the installation cast shadows on wall drawings depicting fictitious charts of whaling voyages. A sense of ominousness pervades the mapped space. The extraordinary chapter in Moby-Dick, ‘The Whiteness of the Whale,’ particularly inspired this installation.
Ahab and Moby-Dick are doppelgangers. As evil twins they're out for mutual destruction. In their total focus they epitomize vengeance. A wall hanging/assemblage at one end of the installation bristles with whale and human eyes. Another large construction conjures up the sinking of the ship, the Pequod, and the darkness of violence. In recent installations I use mapping as a device to describe America’s narrative of past and present violence and greed.”
About Heidi Whitman
Heidi Whitman’s installations, constructions, paintings, and drawings are invented terrains or mental maps. Whitman’s installation, “New World”, was included in Wayfinding: Contemporary Artists, Critical Dialogues, and the Sidney R. Knafel Map Collection at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2020-21. Other recent exhibitions include Papertown at the Fitchburg Art Museum, Charting the World: Subjective Mapping at Suffolk University, Crossing Boundaries: Art// Maps at the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, Heidi Whitman: Mental Map at Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, and The Map as Art at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Earlier exhibitions include shows at the Christopher Henry Gallery in New York, Scope Miami, Pierogi Gallery, the Montserrat College of Art, Wheaton College, the Boston Drawing Project, Clark University, the McMullen Museum of Art, the Southeastern Louisiana Contemporary Art Gallery, and Harvard College. Whitman has exhibited internationally, most recently in The Art of Mapping at TAG Fine Arts in London.
Whitman’s work was featured in Katharine Harmon’s book The Map as Art, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. In 2007 Whitman completed a commission for the City of Cambridge (Jill Brown-Rhone Park). Her works are in collections across the United States, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the McMullen Museum of Art, Tufts University, the Fitchburg Art Museum, the Boston Public Library, IBM, Simmons College, Bank of America, Boston University, the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan Chase, and Fidelity Investments.
She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Whitman is a 2021 recipient of the Mass Cultural Council fellowship in Sculpture/Installation/New Genres. She is also a recipient of the Clarissa Bartlett Traveling Scholarship awarded by the Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts. She was a faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University from 1983 to 2019.
