Tristin Lowe’s life-sized sculpture Mocha Dick, executed in industrial felt covering a specially designed balloon, is tribute to the whale that served as one of the inspirations for Melville’s Moby-Dick. You’ll have to travel south of New York to Philadelphia to see it, though: it’s on view at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, which is devoted to “creating and exhibiting new work in new materials and new media in
collaboration with emerging and established international artists.” 

The whale Mocha Dick terrorized sailors in the waters near Mocha Island off the coast of southern Chile in the early nineteenth century, and he was, according to legend, almost entirely white. You can read first-hand accounts of the whale in a piece by the explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds
entitled “Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a
Manuscript Journal” and published in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine. Reynolds notes one unusual feature of this particular sperm whale:

Viewed from a distance,
the practised eye of the sailor only could decide, that the
moving mass, which constituted this enormous animal, was not a
white cloud sailing along the horizon. On the spermaceti whale,
barnacles are rarely discovered; but upon the head of this
lusus naturae, they had clustered, until it became
absolutely rugged with the shells. In short, regard him as you
would, he was a most extraordinary fish; or, in the vernacular of
Nantucket, “a genuine old sog”, of the first water.

The barnacles feature prominently in Lowe’s depiction of the whale. According to The Artblog, “Terraced scars are carved into the felt, and zig-zag in stitches across
the body. Beautiful barnacles are appliqued, flowering across the old
survivor’s skin in colonies.  In Melville and in Lowe, it is man’s
nemesis, man’s alter-ego, and the engine of man’s greatest folly.” [You can read their full account of the sculpture here.]