Reckoning
Heidi Whitman
"This catalog presents both my installation New World at the Addison Gallery of American Art (2020-2021) and the related Ahab's Head: American Vengeance at the New Bedford Whaling Museum (2025-2026).
In March 2020 I reread Moby-Dick, one chapter a day. The dread and obsession in this great novel echoed how I felt at that time in the pandemic. I was home, and my studio was empty. I was waiting for my installation, New World, to be exhibited at the then-closed Addison Gallery of American Art.
New World, with its fraught sea voyage across the Atlantic and its emphasis on American greed and violence against man and nature, led me to Moby-Dick. When I went back to the studio I decided to make another installation with references to Melville's masterpiece. Mapping is very much a part of both New World and Ahab's Head: American Vengeance, and many of the same materials - ropes, canvas, print, paper, wall drawing - are used in both. Moby-Dick is profoundly beautiful and mysterious. I chose instead to concentrate on the very dark aspect of violence and vengeance in 19th-century whaling, Ahab's monomania, and contemporary America with our epidemic of gun violence, environmental destruction, and greed."
