Several things coming up at Chicago’s Newberry Library in October:
An exhibition, Mapping Outside the Lines, runs from 9 October 2025 to 14 February 26 at the Newberry’s Trienens Galleries.
For centuries, mapmakers have experimented with the placement, density, and purpose of lines like these to make maps seem simple and objective. Just follow this line and you’ll have everything you need—or so the map leads you to believe. These lines are never as straightforward as they seem. This exhibition follows lines on maps to their extremes. By exploring how maps use lines to make the world legible, the exhibition will bring you through examples of mapmakers and artists who have created, bent, and broken these linear rules. By following these lines, you will find maps to be more complex and more motley than they ever imagined!
The 22nd annual Nebenzahl Lecture Series, Mapping from Mexico: New Narratives for the History of Cartography, runs from 16 to 18 October 2025.
The 2025 Nebenzahl Lectures continue to promote new thinking in map history by asking how orienting our stories from Mexico, looking out toward the rest of the world, challenges common narratives and popular assumptions in the history of mapmaking. Despite the prominent role mapping in Mexico has played, cartographic histories are often told from a European perspective. But how do the stories we tell, methodological assumptions we make, and categories we define about maps and map history change when we treat sites of production and reception in Mexico—from Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla to the borderlands—with the same specificity map history has given to European centers?
The Newberry is also hosting a rare map and book fair the same weekend to coincide with the Nebenzahl Lectures.
