Edit position

Last set 2 weeks, 2 days ago. Manual moves override automatic placement until the next shelfie/spine match.

The map as art : contemporary artists explore cartography

by Katharine Harmon

This volume features 360 map-related artworks by contemporary artists, including Ed Ruscha and Maya Lin. It examines the use of cartography as an artistic medium and includes essays by Gayle Clemans on selected artists' works.

Accession 9781568989723 ISBN 9781568989723 Publisher Princeton Architectural Press

Book Images

Reference and live side by side Hover to see live images

Reference

The map as art : contemporary artists explore cartography spine

The map as art : contemporary artists explore cartography cover

Live

No live

CONNECTIONS

No connections

State

on_shelf: True
position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:13
orientation: vertical

Details

Physical

binding_type: Hard Back
dimensions: none captured
spine_text: HARMON THE MAP AS ART JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

LOCATION HISTORY

D 3 Current vertical

1 month, 1 week ago

C 3 vertical

2 months ago

B 3 vertical

2 months, 3 weeks ago

B 4 vertical

2 months, 3 weeks ago

B 3 vertical

2 months, 3 weeks ago

B 3 vertical

3 months, 1 week ago

B 3 vertical

5 months, 1 week ago

Book Location

Updated 2 weeks, 2 days ago

Book Images

Reference and live side by side Hover to see live images

Reference

Live

No live

Vernon snapshot

Frozen copy of Vernon's record from the last sync. Fields tagged → flow back into the Pulse record.

Never synced from Vernon

Identity

name→ title

The map as art : contemporary artists explore cartography

vernon_id

—

accession_no→ accession_number

—

vernon_slug

—

Drives Pulse state

curr_loc_status→ on_shelf

—

location_name

—

location_reason

—

isbn_issn→ isbn (when valid)

—

Descriptive

production_date

—

object_type

—

object_status

—

brief_description

—

Subjects & people

authors→ author (initial fill only)

—

tags→ tags

—

subject_people

—

subject_objects

—

Topics and Themes

1. **Art & Cartography as Intersecting Disciplines**
Maps in this book exist at the boundary between science and art — neither purely functional documents nor purely aesthetic objects. Harmon's collection challenges the conventional separation between cartographic communication and visual art, showing how artists dissolve that boundary through painting, sculpture, collage, and installation.

Connect to books about: history of cartography, visual culture, art history, data visualization, information design.

---

2. **Subjectivity & the Politics of Representation**
Maps have never been neutral. This book foregrounds how every map encodes a perspective — geographic, political, cultural, or personal. Artists use cartographic form to expose the hidden ideologies embedded in how we draw the world, questioning who gets to define borders, centers, and edges.

Connect to books about: critical cartography, postcolonial geography, political geography, power and knowledge.

---

3. **Personal Geography & Interior Mapping**
Many works in the book chart not the external world but internal ones — memory, emotion, identity, and psychological space. The map becomes a vehicle for self-expression, turning inward to chart territories of the mind and body.

Connect to books about: psychogeography, autobiography and memoir, landscape and memory, phenomenology of place.

---

4. **Place, Landscape & the Human Relationship to Space**
The book explores how artists use maps to express a longing for place and to interrogate how humans relate to the physical world — from city neighborhoods to vast natural landscapes. Geography here is not just location but lived experience.

Connect to books about: human geography, sense of place, urban studies, environmental art, landscape theory.

---

5. **Globalization, Politics & Ecology**
The book situates contemporary map art within an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, with many works engaging directly with borders, contested territories, war, and environmental change. Maps become tools of political and ecological commentary.

Connect to books about: globalization, political ecology, environmental humanities, world systems theory, border studies.

---

6. **The Body as Map / The Map as Body**
Several artists in the book use the human body itself as a cartographic subject or medium — mapping its surfaces, tracing its forms, or using it as material. This collapses the distance between the self and the world being represented.

Connect to books about: body art and performance, embodiment and phenomenology, feminist geography, medical humanities.

---

7. **Experimental Media & Mixed-Media Art Practice**
The works span an enormous range of materials and techniques — paint, salt, thread, wood, plywood, photography, collage, and textiles. The book is as much about the expansiveness of contemporary art-making as it is about maps, celebrating material experimentation and process.

Connect to books about: mixed-media art, contemporary art practice, craft and fine art, installation art, art and materiality.

---

8. **Imagination, Invention & Fictive Worlds**
Many maps in the book chart places that do not exist — imaginary geographies, invented territories, dreamscapes. This connects the book to a long tradition of speculative and fictional world-building through cartographic form.

Connect to books about: imaginary worlds and fiction, fantasy cartography, utopia and dystopia, surrealism, the art of illustration and world-building.

The map as art : contemporary artists explore cartography

Book Images

TAGS

CONNECTIONS

State

Details

LOCATION HISTORY

Book Location

Book Images

Vernon snapshot

Topics and Themes