In the title of this exhibition in Mystic, the word “monstrous” has a double meaning. It refers to the sheer scale of those monster mammals that are the largest creatures on Earth—whales! And it also refers to the human practice of killing them. In centuries past, men justified the hunting and harpooning by pointing to the resources reaped from the whale: oil that was used in candles, lamps, and machinery; whalebone for corsets and carving; ambergris for the production of perfume. The slaughter, of course, was unsustainable. When men found oil on land, deep down under their feet, they turned to the Earth’s interior. This exhibition explores the history of whaling as well as its economic and social impact, while telling the stories of whalers through artifacts, art, ephemera, and photography from the museum’s holdings. All these pieces will converse with Jos Sances’s monumental scratchboard mural of a sperm whale, created in 2019–20. Almost life-size at 51 feet in length, the whale is filled with imagery that charts the evolution of industry in America. Titled Or, The Whale, Sances is nodding to Herman Melville’s monster book of 1851—Moby-Dick; or, The Whale—a work of literary genius that is also a judgment on the pursuit of profits, which come at the cost of life itself. —Laura Jacobs