Links & Web Resources
| Art & Maps
Maps are visual information resources that readily lend themselves to referencing in other visual media, such as traditional art forms like painting and quilting. There is a natural affinity between the graphic qualities of maps and art. There is also a rich metaphorical language of mapping which artists use to express ideas about aspects of our lives (for example, the concepts of "place" or "travel" or "topography"). We have selected a few sites that display evocative artistic uses of map forms
and symbolism.
- A:shiwi (Zuni) mapping project
"Jim Enote, Zuni Tribal member and Executive Director of the A:shiwi Museum received a grant from National Geographic to help Zuni artists and cultural advisors re-map their lands with their traditional non-western names. They are using these maps to reconnect with their history and culture. Some of these maps are for public eyes, and some are for tribe members eyes only as they contain sacred place names." - Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather: San Francisco Arts Commission Market Street Project
Outdoor art on Market Street in San Francisco, based on maps. - Art & Cartography
A blog from the Working Group of the International Cartographic Association.
- Biomapping
"Emotional maps" of various cities by Christian Nold. - Cartographic Perspectives
: Bulletin of the North American Cartographic Information
Society, Winter
2006 no.53. Special issue on art and cartography.
Catalog Record | Information on the Cover Art for Cartographic Perspectives - Cutting Edge Maps
From the the cut 'n' paste weblog - Six Contemporary Artists Who Use Maps in Their Work: Biographies and links
- Julie Saul Gallery exhibition
Uncharted Territory: Subjective Mapping by Artists and Cartographers - Lisa Call: Contemporary Quilts
Bold, geometric quilts in part inspired by geologic forms. - Map
Series
by Lauren Camp, Fiber Artist - Brian Dettmer
At the Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago. "Dettmer's work creates new relationships and meanings that emerge from the alteration of text and image, through sculptural subtraction and forces the viewer to respond with their own loaded feelings and views." (from the webpage) - Suzanne Howes-Stevens
Using maps as a background, "Howes-Stevens paints scenes of the world at its edges, where water meets land, primarily images inspired by her life in the northeast." At Migration: A Gallery. - William Kentridge: Tapestries
Exhibition in the "Notations" series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (December 12, 2007 - April 6, 2008). "Incisively political and profoundly poetic, William Kentridge's protean artistic investigation continues in his beautiful series of tapestries begun in 2001. The tapestries stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper and collaged them onto the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps..." - New Visions: Contemporary Art at the [British] National Maritime Museum
"New Visions is the Museum's contemporary art programme to encourage and broaden access to the arts. The Museum commissions British and international artists to explore themes that illustrate the significance of the sea, time and stars to an ever-changing audience." - PAULA SCHER: THE MAPS, an exhibition of paintings by artist and renowned graphic designer Paula Scher at the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York.
- Geospatial Art by Nikolas R. Schiller
Art using aerial imagery. - Brenda Schwarz-Yeager
"Marine artist" -- some paintings on maps & charts. - Emily Miah Stewart
Fiber-collaged memory maps - Ruth Watson
- Terraforms
by Chris Yates - New Visions: Contemporary Art at the British National Maritime Museum
Many of the featured artists work with concepts of mapping, spatial relationships, and other themes.
