Art – Page 8 – The Map Room

Dan Bell’s ‘Tolkien-Style’ Maps of the Lake District

Published on 24 January 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

Dan Bell, “The Lake District National Park.” Giclée print.

Maps of real places done up in the style of fantasy maps are a thing, as those who have been following along will know by now. I’m planning a dedicated page on the subject in the Fantasy Maps section. That page will have to include Dan Bell’s maps of the Lake District—maps, he says, “that resemble the iconic style of J. R. R. Tolkien.” His maps have suddenly got a bit of media attention, which is atypical for this sort of project: BBC News, The Westmoreland Gazette. They resemble more the maps done for the Lord of the Rings movies than the maps created by Christopher Tolkien or Pauline Baynes: one tell is the triple-dot diacritic above the a, which is used in the movie maps and comes from Tolkien’s Elvish script. Bell, a 25-year-old “ordinary guy” from the Lake District, is selling prints of the maps online. [Kenneth Field]

Trumpworld

Published on 15 January 201814 January 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

It’s been a while since we last saw a map of Donald Trump’s world view (previously), but now, inspired by the president’s reported comments about shithole countries, we have a new one from The New Yorker’s Peter Kuper. [Facebook/Twitter]

Previously: The Huffington Post Maps Trump’s World.

Matthew Cusick Interviewed

Published on 28 December 201728 December 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Cusick, “Cat’s Wave,” 2015. Inlaid maps and text on panel, 25″ × 40″.

I’ve blogged about Matthew Cusick and his art, which is based on collages of old maps, before, but this interview from last September in Dallas Innovates is long, in-depth and offers many insights into the artist and his work. [WMS]

A Book Roundup

Published on 19 December 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

The Routledge Handbook

Out last month, the expensive, 600-page Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography (Routledge). Edited by Alexander J. Kent (who co-wrote The Red Atlas) and Peter Vujakovic, the book “draws on the wealth of new scholarship and practice in this emerging field, from the latest conceptual developments in mapping and advances in map-making technology to reflections on the role of maps in society. It brings together 43 engaging chapters on a diverse range of topics, including the history of cartography, map use and user issues, cartographic design, remote sensing, volunteered geographic information (VGI), and map art.” [The History of Cartography Project]

New Academic Books

New academic books on maps and cartography published over the past couple of months include:

The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (University of North Carolina Press), the latest work by the historian of early American map literacy Martin Brückner;
Paul Robert Magocsi’s Carpathian Rus’: A Historical Atlas (University of Toronto Press), a cartographic look at a strategic borderland in central Europe;
Jasper Van Putten’s Networked Nation: Mapping German Cities in Sebastian Munster’s ‘Cosmographia’ (Brill), a study of city views in Renaissance Europe; and
Claire Reddleman’s Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (Routledge), an extremely theoretical study of modern map art.

More on Books We’ve Heard of Before

National Geographic interviews Malachy Tallack, the author of The Un-Discovered Islands, and The Guardian shares seven maps from James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s Where the Animals Go.

Related: Map Books of 2017.

The Melbourne Map

Published on 6 December 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

The Melbourne Map is getting a new edition. The original came out in 1990. Inspired by bird’s-eye maps she’d encountered on her travels, Melinda Clarke teamed up with illustrator Deborah Young to create a pictorial map of the city that became something of a local success. Now, decades later, they’ve teamed up with illustrator Lewis Brownlie to create a new, updated version of the map. A crowdfunding campaign earlier this year was 584 percent successful, raising the equivalent of $88,000; production has been delayed a bit by revisions to the map, but it’s on track to be completed in 2018. They’re taking preorders; copies of the original map are also available. [ICA]

Geological Mosaic Map

Published on 5 December 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

The York Museum Gardens’ Geological Mosaic Map is a four-metre-square pebble mosaic that depicts the Yorkshire part of William Smith’s 1815 geological map of Great Britain—a copy of which is held at the adjacent Yorkshire Museum. The mosaic was commissioned in 2015 and created by mosaic artist Janette Ireland, who “used many imaginative devices—including fossils, both real and formed from pebbles, discarded stone from the minster and tiny millstones made of millstone grit—to represent the ideas which Smith was demonstrating in his map. […] The pebbles in the mosaic reflect the colours Smith used in his map, but genuine Yorkshire rocks are displayed in the flower beds on either side of the mosaic, alongside strips of the pebbles used to represent them.” Photo gallery. [WMS]

A Video Profile of James Niehues, Ski Resort Map Artist

Published on 29 November 201729 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Earlier this year Great Big Story did a short video piece about legendary ski resort map artist James Niehues, whom I’ve blogged about here on several previous occasions. Though this 2½-minute video is obviously less in-depth than, say, the Aspen Daily News’s profile of him from last year, I don’t mind another look at him and his work. [Atlas Obscura]

Previously: James Niehues Passes the Torch; James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.

An Exhibitions Roundup

Published on 23 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Installation view, *You Are Here NYC: Art, Information, and Mapping*. Photo: Jason Mandella Photography.

Hyperallergic takes a look a the Leventhal’s current exhibition, Beneath Our Feet: Mapping the World Below, which runs until 25 February 2018. Previously: 1, 2. [Dave Smith]

Exhibits from last month’s Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography (previously) remain on display at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center until 6 April 2018, as well as online. [WMS]

You Are Here NYC: Art, Information, and Mapping, an art exhibition at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery curated by Katharine Harmon and featuring maps in a similar vein to her 2016 book You Are Here: NYC (reviewed here), closed last week (my bad for not getting to it sooner), but in the interest of posterity, here’s Gothamist’s coverage.

Londonist Mapped

Published on 17 November 201716 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Londonist Mapped: Hand Drawn Maps for the Curious Explorer came out last month from AA Publishing. (It’ll be out in North America next February.) Londonist describes their book thusly: “The book presents dozens of beautiful maps of the capital, from historic plans to specially commissioned art. Here you’ll find maps of lost Victorian buildings, little-known musical history, subterranean London and many more. The book also includes a reprint of our popular Anglo-Saxon London map.” I wonder if it includes “Bridges of London.” [WMS]

Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps

Published on 16 November 201720 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

With Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps (University of Chicago Press, March 2017), Stephen J. Hornsby makes the case for the pictorial map as a distinct and significant genre of mapmaking that is worthy of study and preservation.

Because pictorial maps were artistic rather than scientific, Hornsby argues, they were ignored as a subject of cartographic study—“treated as ephemera, the flotsam and jetsam of an enormous sea of popular culture.”¹ As such they have not been preserved to the same extent as more strictly cartographic maps. (Being printed on cheap acid paper didn’t help.) But as products of popular culture they were distinctive—and ubiquitous. “By World War II,” he writes, “pictorial maps had created a powerful visual image of the United States and were beginning to reimagine the look of the world for a mass consumer audience.”² They were so prevalent, I suppose, that they were invisible. Taken for granted. It frequently falls to the historian of popular culture to point out that the common and everyday is, in fact, significant. That’s what Hornsby is doing here.

Continue reading “Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps” →

Osher Map Art Exhibition Opens Today

Published on 16 November 201715 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Opening today at the Osher Map Library in Portland, Maine and running until 10 March 2018, an exhibition of cartographic art called Go Where the Map Takes You: The Intersection of Cartography and Creativity. “Maps show many versions of our world, for many purposes, but their simplest purpose is to show the way from one place to another. The artists in this exhibition have used the techniques of mapping, and maps themselves, to show the way to the metaphorical and the metaphysical. We invite you to explore these artworks and see where they lead you.” Featuring several familiar artists.

Cartographers in the Field

Published on 14 November 201714 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Cartographers in the Field: “This Depression-era oil painting was created by USGS field man Hal Shelton in 1940. The painting depicts mapping techniques used in the early days of cartography, including an alidade and stadia rod for determining distances and elevations and a plane-table for sketching contour lines. A USGS benchmark is visible near the top. The straight white lines represent survey transects. Note the ‘US’ marking on the canteen: many of the USGS field supplies were obtained from Army surplus.” [Osher Map Library]

Mapping the Borders

Published on 14 November 201713 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Inge Panneels and Jeffrey Sarmiento, “Liverpool Map,” 2010.

Mapping the Borders, a series of talks, exhibitions and workshops hosted by the University of Sunderland from 18 to 25 November as part of this year’s Being Human festival, includes an art exhibition, a workshop on glass mapmaking, a full day of activities on the 19th, and a number of pop-up talks. [NLS]

Maps from The Magicians Trilogy Available

Published on 13 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Roland Chambers, map for *The Magician King*, 2011.

Roland Chambers is selling limited-edition prints of his maps for Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy. Each print costs £100 and is A2-sized (42 × 59.4 cm); only 100 copies of each will be printed. More at The Verge. I’ve admired Chambers’s work for a while: these are fantasy maps that are less derivative and closer to their original source matter (children’s book illustrations) than the standard fantasy map fare. [Lev Grossman]

Previously: Fantasy Map Roundup.

Joyce Kozloff’s Girlhood

Published on 3 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Joyce Kozloff, “Red States, Blue States,” 2017. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 36×48″.

Joyce Kozloff’s exhibition at the D. C. Moore Gallery in New York, Girlhood, ends tomorrow. (It’s also online.) Kozloff is a mixed-media artist whose work regularly blends the cartographic, the political and the decorative; in Girlhood the media she incorporates are her own childhood drawings.

Kozloff discovered folders containing her carefully preserved grade school art during the emotional process of packing up and closing her parents’ house after their deaths. Her occasionally phantasmagorical and meticulously painted archaic charts offer a dialogue between the youthful wonderment preserved in her elementary school drawings and adult geographical knowledge. These works bear a riveting similarity to her oeuvre of the last 25 years – maps, charts, decorative flourishes, information organized in graphs, and vignettes that expand the worlds depicted.

More on the exhibition from the New York Times and the Villager. [The Map as Art/WMS]

Previously: Kozloff’s Exterior and Interior Cartographies; Envisioning Maps.