Moby-Dick Art in the Heartland, 2009

Moby-Dick Art in the Heartland, 2009 ROBERT K. WALLACE Northern Kentucky University I n 2009 Moby-Dick-inspired art sometimes seemed to be everywhere. While my students and I were reading the novel in my class on “Melville and the Arts” in January, we heard news of the two-week Melvillapalooza being held in New York City concurrently with a revival of Carl Adinolfi’s one-man theatrical adaptation of Moby-Dick. By the time we were studying Elizabeth Schultz’s Unpainted to the Last in February, a major exhibition of Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick engravings had opened at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan. In mid-April, two weeks before the end of our semester, four students accompanied me to northern Illinois for the opening of Moby Dick: Heart of the Sea at the Rockford Art Museum. On the same day, an exhibition of Moby-Dick drawings by Aileen Callahan opened at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. I had known before the April trip to Rockford that many of the works in that exhibition would be coming to northern Kentucky for an exhibition at Gallerie Zaum in Newport, KY. I did not then know that the Newport exhibition would include works to be created by three students in my spring semester class—or that it would be the site of a Moby-Dick Marathon after its closing date was extended into November. Many individuals who might never have encountered Melville’s works in print discovered him through art. Their heartfelt responses have contributed to the “glancing bird’s eye” view of the Rockford and Newport exhibitions below. Moby Dick: Heart of the Sea Rockford Art Museum April 17–July 5, 2009 W hen I approached Patty Rhea of the Rockford Art Museum with the idea of an exhibition featuring George Klauba and Kathleen Piercefield (each of whose works had appeared in both the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville in 2006 and the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick in 2007), she assured me that her museum would be large enough C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 100 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S M O B Y - D I C K I N T H E H E A R T L A N D to hold not only the three dozen Moby-Dick acrylics that Klauba had painted since 2003 and the two dozen Moby-Dick prints that Piercefield had created since 2004 but also the work of one additional artist. Her enthusiasm sustained the show on all levels, as these extracts suggest: Curating this exhibition has been a two-year labor of love for Robert Wallace and me, an endeavor that felt right from the start. Wallace was keen on the idea of a show based on Moby-Dick imagery and quickly sold me on the concept. The project was appealing on many levels . A show based on literature, for readers of all ages, would promote reading and re-examination of the nineteenth-century masterpiece. Furthermore, the expansiveness of RAM’s main galleries, over 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, would allow for a splashy presentation. Heart of The Sea felt like a hit for both our Museum and community. The narrative paintings of Chicago artist George Klauba seemed a natural choice. I was already familiar with Klauba’s intricately painted realistic works depicting characters from the novel as mythical birds. A trip to Klauba’s Chicago studio allowed me to view current work and meet the artist. He is a consummate storyteller whose intricate narratives bring scenes from the book directly to life. I was unfamiliar with the work of Kathleen Piercefield, the second artist selected for the exhibition. A fellow resident of Kentucky, Bob Wallace witnessed the progression of Kathleen’s work first-hand. Since 2004, she has created nearly 30 multimedia, intricately layered prints inspired by Melville’s classic . . . Her seminal work, Queequeg in his Own Person, immediately sold me on the artist’s...