Art Exhibitions
Melville, like Ishmael, “swam through libraries and sailed through oceans” in pursuit of the whale. His shipmates, like those of Ishmael, came from all the “isles and ends of the earth.” The Moby-Dick artworks you will see on display in the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art on the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut are on loan from the Melville Society Archive and the Elizabeth Schultz Collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The artists who created them are from Greece, France, England, Canada, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and California.
In genre, medium, and style, these artworks are as varied as the chapters in Melville’s Moby-Dick. We have paintings, watercolors, drawings, sculptures, artist books, and sculptures in oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink, tar, and pencil applied on canvas, paper, or wood through brushwork, etching, mezzotint, lithograph, screen print, or digital technique. These artworks oscillate, as Melville’s verbal aesthetic does, through all gradations from figurative to abstract.
The persons pictured in these artworks range in nautical occupation from cabin boy to common sailor, from cook to mate, from harpooneer to captain. They range in racial classification from White, to Black, to Indigenous, to Asian, to Polynesian just as the whales we see are classified from Sperm, to Right, to Black, to Humpback, to Thrasher.
Melville, like Ishmael, wants us to embrace it all, to preserve sustainable lives among diversities of living creatures of the sea and land in fluid harmony for the common good of “all the inmates of the place one lodges in.”
The show is beautifully curated by Jeanne Ciravolo, Director of the Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art, in collaboration with Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, University of Connecticut Professor of English and Director of Maritime Studies, and Robert K. Wallace, Northern Kentucky University Regents Professor of English. The Melville Society wishes to thank Jeanne Ciravolo for her inspiration in creating this exhibition.
The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery of Art will be open during both evening receptions and Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons 12 noon—4 pm. Please come enjoy these magnificent pieces of art. The exhibition will run June 5-20, 2025. The artworks on this page will all be included in the exhibition.
In addition to the Melville artworks on display at UConn Avery Point, Jos Sances’s 51-foot scratchboard mural Or, The Whale will be on display in the Monstrous exhibit in the Collins Gallery at Mystic Seaport Museum during our visit to the Museum on Wednesday, June 18.
Included below are links to Robert K. Wallace’s essay, “Art in the Melville Society Archive” (2020), and Jeffrey Peterson’s “Or, The Whale by Jos Sances: Ark of the Anthropocene” (2023).
Image #1. Peter Michael Martin, Melville the Man #1 (2013). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
Image #2. Kathleen Piercefield, Women of New Bedford (2004). Image courtesy of The Melville Society and New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Image # 3. George Klauba, The Pod (2004). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
Image # 4. Vanessa Hodgkinson, Those that Got Away (2014). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
Image # 5. Robert Del Tredici, Ubiquitous (2014). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
Image # 6. Benton Spruance, Epilogue (1968). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
Image # 7. Matt Kish, Fleece (2014). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
Image # 8. Matt Kish.Queequeg (2014). Image courtesy of The Melville Society.
ESSAYS
Words and Shapes on Paper:
Art in the Melville Society Archive
ROBERT K. WALLACE
Northern Kentucky University
Click HERE to read
Or, The Whale by Jos Sances:
Ark of the Anthropocene
JEFFREY PETERSON
The College Preparatory School
Click HERE to read