Art

Spertus Institute Closes Controversial Show
Imaginary Coordinates, a controversial exhibition that juxtaposed contemporary Israeli and Palestinian art with antique maps of the region, has been closed prematurely by the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, which had been putting on the show as part of Chicago’s… »
Posted on Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 3:37 PM
Categories: Art, Censorship & Security, Chicago Festival of Maps
Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art
Opening today at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center and running until August 17: Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art. See also ArtDaily. Announced last year; see previous entry (the description is unchanged; the dates are not)…. »
Posted on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 11:01 AM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Erik Laffer’s Cartography Series
At the Amrose Sable Gallery in Albany, New York until May 25, an exhibition of Erik Laffer’s Cartography Series. The Albany Times Union has a review: “[T]he frenetic undercurrents of Laffer’s abstractions seem to strike a chord with our… »
Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 5:39 PM
Categories: Art
Painting on Maps
An interesting thread on MapHist about painting on maps — i.e., using a map like a canvas — yielded links to the following artists. Suzanne Howe-Stevens: “Using maps as a background or frame allows her to emphasize the borders that… »
Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 8:27 PM
Categories: Art
The Wire Maps of Elizabeth Berrien
Artist Elizabeth Berrien does wire sculpture; some of her creations are maps. “She’d often felt that the intricate, organic lines of our living planet and its features — continents, great river and mountain ranges — would make a glorious… »
Posted on Friday, April 25, 2008 at 8:18 PM
Categories: Art
Elisabeth Lecourt
The art of Elisabeth Lecourt includes clothing made from maps. Bloesem writes, “These clothes are made out of maps from Paris, New York, London and other places, of course you can’t wear them, but hanging them as art on… »
Posted on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 9:16 PM
Categories: Art
Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square
Maps: Finding Our Place in the World isn’t the only map exhibition the Walters Art Museum is involved with; Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square is an art exhibition in Mount Vernon Place that “features contemporary art by 10 emerging… »
Posted on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 12:07 PM
Categories: Art, Baltimore Festival of Maps
Look Now Look All Around
Dawn Gavin writes in to tell us about an exhibition she’s curating at the Maryland State Art Council’s James Backas Gallery, in conjunction with the Baltimore Festival of Maps: Look Now Look All Around. Inherent within the construction of… »
Posted on Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 12:09 PM
Categories: Art, Baltimore Festival of Maps
Map Art Exhibitions: The Map Show, Elise Wagner
At the Rockland Center for the Arts in West Nyack, New York, until April 8, The Map Show, an exhibition featuring several contemporary artists. The New York Times has a review: The show presents the work of eight artists… »
Posted on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 11:47 AM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Hand Drawn Map Association
The Hand Drawn Map Association “is an ongoing archive of maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand. Whenever you draw a map explaining how to get somewhere or find a map or other hand drawn diagram laying around… »
Posted on Friday, February 29, 2008 at 7:34 PM
Categories: Art
Connie Brown’s Custom Maps
The Hartford Courant reports on an interesting business: Connie Brown, working as Redstone Studios, paints one-of-a-kind, custom maps for her clients. Preparing the highly personal maps can take up to a year, and she usually works on three commissions at… »
Posted on Friday, February 15, 2008 at 10:35 AM
Categories: Art
Jeff Schmuki
Pattern Recognition is an exhibition of the work of Jeff Schmuki — “featuring sculptural ceramic works and installations that explore the relationship between cartography, documentary, memory and the natural/manmade landscape” — at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at… »
Posted on Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
William Kentridge’s Tapestries
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art until April 6, an exhibition of tapestries by the major South African artist, William Kentridge. The Porter tapestries “stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction… »
Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 2:28 PM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
V&A: Mapping the Imagination
At the Victoria and Albert Museum until April 27, Mapping the Imagination “includes maps made to inform or to entertain, maps enhanced by imaginative embellishments, maps that show imaginary places, and works in which artists have adapted map iconography to… »
Posted on Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 7:14 AM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Mark Webber
Mark Webber’s art includes city maps built from tyographical fragments, arranged in ways that both shape and label the map. At right, Amsterdam; he’s also done New York and London. Thanks to John Deen for the link…. »
Posted on Monday, January 7, 2008 at 7:34 PM
Categories: Art
Nancy Goodman Lawrence
The art of Nancy Goodman Lawrence uses the stuff of maps in collages: “Maps are a huge resource for my work, less for their literal representations than the endless possibilities they offer in rendering the geography of the human… »
Posted on Monday, January 7, 2008 at 7:26 PM
Categories: Art
Landon Mackenzie
Houbart’s Hope, an exhibition by the Vancouver-based Landon Mackenzie, opens this Thursday at Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery in Montreal. “In Houbart’s Hope Mackenzie combines her interests in landscape, cartography and neuroscience. Although abstract in appearance, vestiges… »
Posted on Sunday, January 6, 2008 at 3:39 PM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Berrini Exhibition in San Francisco
New work by Francesca Berrini (see previous entry) is on display at the Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, SF Station reports: “Part designer, part surrealist cartographer, Portland-based Francesca Berrini creates fantastical geographies from maps that have… »
Posted on Sunday, January 6, 2008 at 11:03 AM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
CSM on the Festival of Maps, Map Art and Books
A piece in last Friday’s Christian Science Monitor looks at the Festival of Maps through the lens of map art, referencing our friend Nikolas Schiller, the special map art issue of Cartographic Perspectives, the book accompanying the Field Museum exhibition,… »
Posted on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 7:34 PM
Categories: Art, Chicago Festival of Maps
New Paula Scher Exhibition
Paula Scher (see previous entry) returns to the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York with an exhibition of new works. According to the gallery, “Scher expands on her highly acclaimed Maps series to create her most engaging work yet,… »
Posted on Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 5:55 PM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
James Niehues Profile
The Colorado Springs Gazette profiles ski resort illustrator James Niehues, whom we first encountered in March 2006. “For 20 years, Niehues, 61, has been North America’s preeminent ski resort illustrator — the guy who paints the trail maps for… »
Posted on Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 1:39 PM
Categories: Art, Topo Maps & Trails
Two Map Art Exhibitions
An exhibition of Matthew Picton’s art just wrapped up at the Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery in Portland, Oregon. “His cartography transforms the traditional two dimensional mapping system into a multi-layered sculpture of communication, transportation, and rivers,” says the gallery, “thus both… »
Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 12:14 PM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Christa Dichgans
Christa Dichgan’s art requires close scrutiny: her map-based paintings are countries whose outlines are filled with figures, objects and other tiny details to which a thumbnail such as this (of her 2005 work, “Europa,” a mix of oils and… »
Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 7:29 PM
Categories: Art
Machado’s Maps
João Machado’s artwork includes map collages “made entirely with vintage maps,” he writes. “The people shown in [my] work are depicted in the maps of the region in which they are from. Sometimes the maps used are contrapuntal to… »
Posted on Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 8:42 PM
Categories: Art
James Turner’s Map of Humanity
Way back in the early days of this blog, I linked to portions of James Turner’s Map of Humanity, where feelings, beliefs and aspirations are places on an imaginary map. He was kind enough to write back to explain… »
Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 9:12 PM
Categories: Art
Get Lost
Get Lost: Artists Map Downtown New York “is a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory… »
Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 9:01 PM
Categories: Art, New York
Relief Map Carpet
This astonishing relief map carpet, made from foam bars of different heights and colours, is a product of the Dutch design firm Studio Laurens van Wieringen. Via Boing Boing and Very Spatial…. »
Posted on Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 7:08 PM
Categories: Art
Molly Holmberg’s Watercolour Maps
Most trail maps are spare and functional: without context, you might not even know that trees and mountains are involved. But geography graduate student Molly Holmberg has produced a watercolour map of the trails and open spaces of Bangor, Maine… »
Posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 1:55 PM
Categories: Art, Topo Maps & Trails
A Map Blog Update: GeoWeb, Cartographismes and More
The GeoWeb 2007 conference, which takes place later this month and deals with “the convergence of Web technologies, XML, Web services, and GIS,” has a conference blog. The blog associated with Krygier and Wood’s excellent book, Making Maps (reviewed here),… »
Posted on Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 8:03 PM
Categories: Art, Blogs, Conferences, GIS, Online Maps
A Map Exhibitions Roundup
Zoom (June 30 to August 18, Santa Monica, California). A group exhibition of map art at Santa Monica Art Studios’ Arena 1. “Working in the USA, Britain and Australia, all 19 artists in the show employ maps as resource material,… »
Posted on Sunday, July 1, 2007 at 4:14 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Art, Exhibitions
Francesca Berrini
The art of Francesca Berrini, who “transforms vintage maps of places she has longed to visit into fine art maps of entirely new and imagined worlds. She obsessively tears up original vintage maps into tiny pieces, and then reconstitutes… »
Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 2:47 PM
Categories: Art
London’s Kerning
London’s Kerning is a map of London done in type — you have to step back from the large (153 cm × 101.5 cm), limited-edition poster to recognize the city. Interesting. Via Kottke; more at Moon River…. »
Posted on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 8:14 PM
Categories: Art, London
Nikolas Schiller
Yesterday’s Washington Post had a major piece about Nikolas Schiller, who’s been doing artful things with aerial photography and doing his best to stay under the web’s collective radar. (Sorry.) Excerpts from the Post article: Schiller barely pauses on… »
Posted on Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 3:11 PM
Categories: Art, Satellite & Aerial
More Memory Maps
Jason Kottke is fascinated by memory maps — that is to say, maps drawn entirely from memory. In addition to some sites we’ve seen here before (previous entries below), he presents a couple more for our enjoyment. First, the… »
Posted on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 8:38 PM
Categories: Art, Education
Scot J. Wittman
Still another artist who uses maps as raw materials: Scot J. Wittman. He explains how: I made large facial portraits of these explorers by collaging together tonal variations of the maps of the areas they explored. I then constructed… »
Posted on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 1:51 PM
Categories: Art
Nina Katchadourian
Nina Katchadourian is another artist who uses the physical material of maps in her work, whether rearranged, dissected or put onto slides. She’s also labelled clumps of moss that look like maps. Via Platial News and Neogeography…. »
Posted on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 5:37 PM
Categories: Art
More Map Art
The artists Dinesh links to in his MetaFilter post on map art are ones I’ve linked to before, but among the comments are a few examples of maps in art that I hadn’t encountered yet: Heidi Neilson’s map collages;… »
Posted on Sunday, January 28, 2007 at 9:30 AM
Categories: Art
Susan Stockwell
Susan Stockwell’s art makes frequent use of maps, either as raw material and as the shape of her final product. Examples of the former include dresses made of maps; examples of the latter include a map of India stitched… »
Posted on Thursday, January 18, 2007 at 5:43 PM
Categories: Art
Manhattan, a Poem and Map
“Manhattan,” by Howard Horowitz, first appeared in the New York Times on August 30, 1997: it was a poem in the shape of Manhattan Island, about Manhattan, with references to various neighbourhoods and landmarks in the appropriate locations. It’s… »
Posted on Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 2:08 PM
Categories: Art, New York
Analogue Art Map
Analogue Art Map is a group that uses non-digital technology (e.g., pen and paper) to map inherently digital things — MUDs, social networks and so forth. “[T]he group seeks to both record and generate connections between creative individuals and the… »
Posted on Tuesday, January 2, 2007 at 7:37 AM
Categories: Art
Matthew Cusick
An exhibition of Matthew Cusick’s art, which uses collages of old maps, just wrapped up at the Lisa Dent Gallery, but the images are still available online. From the Artkrush review: “Clipped from yellowed atlases and geography textbooks, the… »
Posted on Monday, December 18, 2006 at 9:43 AM
Categories: Art
Resistant Maps Report
Régine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art attended the Resistant Maps conference over the weekend, and has a two-part* report here and here. Summary: “It was a small, unaffected and friendly event but it was also one of… »
Posted on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 2:26 PM
Categories: Art, Conferences, Exhibitions
Resistant Maps
Geobloggers points to an upcoming conference/exhibition in Genoa, Italy this weekend: Resistant Maps: Artistic Actions in the Interconnected Urban Territory. The representation of territory holds a historical role in the privileges of power. Geographical data has always been in its… »
Posted on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 at 9:11 PM
Categories: Art, Conferences, Exhibitions
Flight Patterns
Aaron Koblin took FAA flight data and made some flashy animations out of the flight paths. Via atlas(t)…. »
Posted on Sunday, November 5, 2006 at 7:29 PM
Categories: Art, Aviation, Video
Kozloff’s Exterior and Interior Cartographies
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s art critic points to an exhibition at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon: “Exterior and Interior Cartographies” by Joyce Kozloff, which, according to the museum, “features drawings, collages, prints, paintings and sculpture. For fifteen years,… »
Posted on Sunday, October 8, 2006 at 2:32 PM
Categories: Art
Burning Man 2006
Lisa Hoffman’s map of the 2006 Burning Man festival is more colourful than last year’s effort; see her previous burning maps — and much more detailed than the official version (PDF). Via All Points Blog. Update, Aug. 26: Boing… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 23, 2006 at 5:07 AM
Categories: Art
Giclées
A giclée is a high-quality art print made on a special inkjet printer. It’s by no means exclusive to maps, but it’s a term worth remembering. I first learned about it in the context of a MapHist discussion of fakes,… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at 9:54 PM
Categories: Art, Collecting
Los Angeles Mapped; Jo Mora
Boing Boing links to Los Angeles Mapped, the online version of an exhibition of historical maps of Los Angeles on display through January 2007 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The maps on display are diverse in both subject… »
Posted on Monday, August 7, 2006 at 7:43 AM
Categories: Antique Maps, Art, Exhibitions, Los Angeles
Licence Plate Map
I was at my local map store over the weekend, and of course they had a good selection of map-related tchotchkes — umbrellas, 3D jigsaw puzzles, squeeze-ball globes. In that vein, this map of the U.S. hand-made from state… »
Posted on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 8:28 AM
Categories: Art
Cartographic Perspectives: Maps and Art
What is map art? While I’ve posted a few entries on the subject of maps and art, it’s not something I’ve really stopped to think about. An artist’s work or installation incorporates maps. Good enough for me: post it. But… »
Posted on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 11:32 AM
Categories: Art, Scholarly Journals
Kim Dingle
Kim Dingle, Maps of the U.S. Drawn from Memory by Las Vegas Teenagers, 1990: Via Kottke…. »
Posted on Friday, July 7, 2006 at 6:33 PM
Categories: Art
Simon Elvins’s “Silent London”
Simon Elvins’s “Silent London”: “Using information the government has collected on noise levels within London, a map has been plotted of the capital’s most silent spaces. The map intends to reveal a hidden landscape of quiet spaces and shows… »
Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2006 at 8:26 AM
Categories: Art, London
Sarah Trigg
The paintings of Sarah Trigg: “Taking inspiration from secondhand surgery textbooks, airport layouts, and fuzzy aerial photos found on the Web, Trigg maps fictive terrains that are part landscape, part bodyscape.” Mixing the map and medicine metaphors is not… »
Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 2:00 PM
Categories: Art
1520+ Hometowns
Tofu’s “1520+ Hometowns” is a collage of all the town names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, cut from road maps: “In March of 2004 I began a map piece cutting out the hometown of each American serviceman and woman… »
Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 2:38 PM
Categories: Art, Iraq War
Map Tattoos
On new mapping blog atlas(t), Claire Light has a neat post about map tattoos: Unfortunately, subsequent repeated google searches didn’t turn up any other map tattoos, treasure or otherwise. What they did turn up were: 1) instances of people using… »
Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 at 8:05 AM
Categories: Art
Peter Dykhuis, Visual Artist
Maps, flags and state symbols abound in Peter Dykhuis’s art: “You Are Here” superimposes a map of Halifax on envelopes; “Radar Paintings” uses airport radar images; “World View: The G7 Suite” encloses maps from each country within their respective flags…. »
Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006 at 12:57 PM
Categories: Art
There’s Always Room for San Francisco
Not exactly a map, but it’s close enough — it’s a city model, right? — and it’s cool: San Francisco in Jell-O (see also)…. »
Posted on Thursday, April 6, 2006 at 7:59 AM
Categories: Art, San Francisco
Exhibition Roundup: Fort Worth, Texas; Hannibal, Missouri
Patterns of Progress, an exhibition of Texas bird’s-eye-view maps — previously covered here — is now running at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas until May 28. More than sixty highly detailed and oversized prints in this special… »
Posted on Monday, March 6, 2006 at 3:26 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Art, Cities, Exhibitions
James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps
Commercial artist James Niehues is responsible for a large number of panoramic ski resort maps — those bird’s-eye-view illustrations showing all the runs. A lot of them are available on his web site: there are galleries for eastern U.S., western… »
Posted on Thursday, March 2, 2006 at 9:00 PM
Categories: Art, Topo Maps & Trails
Paula Scher: The Maps
Paula Scher: The Maps is an exhibition of Scher’s paintings at the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York; it runs until December 17. From the Gallery’s web site: “This show, consists of a series of twelve large-scale canvases — intricate,… »
Posted on Friday, November 18, 2005 at 1:28 PM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Cartography 101 at the Johnsonese
Opening tomorrow at the Johnsonese Gallery in Chicago, an exhibition of map-based art called Cartography 101. The gallery’s web site has a few examples, but I expect they won’t stay on the front page after the show closes on September… »
Posted on Friday, August 26, 2005 at 8:52 AM
Categories: Art, Exhibitions
Hand-drawn Burning Man Map
Burning Man 2005 is upon us — or at least it’s upon some of you. Lisa Hoffman’s hand-drawn map (834-KB GIF) of the site is quite literally a work of art. Via Boing Boing…. »
Posted on Monday, August 22, 2005 at 9:12 PM
Categories: Art
Hand Made Maps
Hand Made Maps is a London-based commercial art studio that specializes in maps; the site is an extensive portfolio of their recent work for various clients. Some really nice stuff there. Thanks to Clare Lyons for the link…. »
Posted on Thursday, July 21, 2005 at 10:59 PM
Categories: Art
Never Ending Drawing
Oskar Karlin: “Every day I document my movements by drawing them on a map. From that, patterns and images appear.” Select “Projects,” then “Never Ending Drawing.” Via Things Magazine…. »
Posted on Tuesday, July 12, 2005 at 11:19 AM
Categories: Art, Tracerouting
Art of the Road
Roadmap Art of the Road is a Flickr group that shares “scanned images from vintage roadmaps from gas stations, municipalities and the like.” The focus is on the cover art, not the cartography, but it’s still of interest. See previous… »
Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2005 at 8:58 AM
Categories: Art, Groups & Societies, Roads
Guillermo Kuitca
An exhibition of the art of Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser & Wirth, London: The main gallery space features Everything, 2004, an impressive four-panel painting which interpolates fragments of American road maps. The enigmatic veined surface invites the viewer for closer… »
Posted on Tuesday, March 8, 2005 at 10:40 AM
Categories: Art
Poyarkov’s Map of Ukraine
MetaFilter is one of the best-kept secret sources for map links, and now that Matt has added tag support, they’re all the easier to find: just look for the map and maps tags. Of course, tagging is optional, and some… »
Posted on Monday, February 21, 2005 at 9:56 AM
Categories: Art
Memory Mapping
Megan Hurst writes to tell us about her Memory Mapping project: “Memorymapping.com is a site I co-created which invites visitors to draw maps of places they’ve lived based solely on memory. Their maps are then saved in a database and… »
Posted on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 9:49 AM
Categories: Art
Mapping the Body
The art of Mary Daniel Hobson involves the use of collages on images of the human body. Many of the collages are of old maps; browse the gallery and see what you can find. As early mapmakers used pen and… »
Posted on Sunday, October 3, 2004 at 11:58 AM
Categories: Art
More Road Maps
More scans of old maps — the covers only, alas — at a site that looks like it was just getting started — back in 1998 — and stayed there (via Things Magazine)…. »
Posted on Thursday, April 29, 2004 at 9:26 AM
Categories: Art, Roads
Road Map of the Human Body
This illustration of the human body as a road map — veins and arteries appear as expressways, for example — seems to be a very, very neat medical illustration exercise (via Kottke and Muxway)…. »
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2004 at 2:31 PM
Categories: Art
Hand-drawn Maps
This is fascinating: a collection of hand-drawn maps — the sort that people giving someone directions scribble down on a scrap of paper or napkin. i collect personal maps people draw. one’s memory and perception of a place is very… »
Posted on Thursday, March 4, 2004 at 8:44 AM
Categories: Art

Note: Entries from 2003 were not categorized and will not appear in the category archives. Please consult the monthly archives.