Moby-Dick: A Marathon Reading
Dec 7, 2015
Musician Emilyn Brodsky plays the ukulele and writes simple songs that she sings with torrential enthusiasm. Photograph by Filip Wolak
In dialogue with Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick series, artists and writers read Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in the Whitney’s fifth-floor galleries on November 13 and 14.
The two-day reading culminated on the 164th anniversary of the novel’s publication. This Public Program was co-organized with the Moby-Dick Marathon NYC, a biennial event founded in 2012.
See a selection of the readers and audiences in the slideshow below. All photographs by Filip Wolak, November 2015.
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Jessica Strand is the Associate Director for Public Programs and Events at The New York Public Library.
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A.K. Burns is a multidisciplinary artist who employs a vivid combination of sculpture, video, and more in an exploration of the gendered body as rooted in queer and feminist politics.
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Another reader at the Moby-Dick event.
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John Freeman is a writer and a literary critic whose writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world.
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Halsey Rodman is an artist who makes installations containing assemblages, videos, photography, text and figurative sculpture, which form mythological narratives.
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Doreen St. Felix is a feminist writer and artist who worked as both a writer and translator for Steve McQueen's forthcoming HBO drama Codes of Conduct.
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Amy Virginia Buchanan (right) stages Midnight Forecastle, a play within the novel. Buchanan is a writer, musician, actor, and producer. She is also the artistic director and co-founder of Spring Street Social Society.
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Gia and Anderson from the Whitney’s teen program, Youth Insights Leaders, participate in Midnight Forecastle.
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Readers in the audience.
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D. Graham Burnett is a professor of history and history of science at Princeton University. He is an editor at Cabinet magazine and the author of four books.
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Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels, a book of short stories and three works of non-fiction.
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Jen Doll prepares to read. Doll is an author and a former staff writer for The Wire.
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Rich Beck is an assistant editor at n+1. He is currently writing a book about the 1980s satanic cult worship/daycare sex abuse hysteria.