Getting to the Newberry Library to visit “Mapping Outside the Lines,” an exhibition of maps old and new, scientific and artistic, was easy. I typed the address into my car’s GPS and followed its directions. I did not have to deal with the awkwardness of unfolding and refolding a large sheet of paper, nor sorting the myriad layers of information contained therein, nor ignoring the rest of the illustrated region, beyond my starting point and destination. I had no trouble figuring out where I was and I didn’t get lost, since GPS always knows my position and adjusts accordingly.
This looked and felt very different from how maps were used up until a mere two decades ago. Happily, the Newberry has a rack of Rand McNally road maps, just like at a gas station of yore, that anyone unfamiliar with such marvelous, unwieldy things can try out. They will no doubt baffle some visitors. Reading maps, not to mention tucking them back up neatly, takes skill. What do thin versus thick versus dotted lines mean? Or those hatch marks, that fuzz, those colors, the tiny numbers over there? Is that a crease or a geographic feature? Why does the territory stop here, what’s not being shown in that blank area, and how about the space that’s blocked by the legend?
Over the centuries, mapmakers have experimented, innovated, and eventually standardized the representation of both natural and man-made features, often in keeping with scientific discovery. Once the floor of the Atlantic Ocean or a Chilean mountain range had been surveyed, charts needed to be drawn up to communicate that information, and it was hardly obvious how. Long-ago cartographers simply drew pictures of waves or mountains in the appropriate areas, but beginning in the 18th century, different types of lines began to be used to show depth and altitude on a flat surface. A display of books for teaching mapmaking illustrates the possibilities — and provides a surprising boon for figurative and abstract artists alike. Joseph Enthoffer’s “Types of Orography,” published in 1870 and concerning the geography of mountains, could be a page of erotic ink drawings. British artist Ed Fairburn caught the drift, as can be seen in his 2017 remake of an old map of Cardiff, painted over with squiggles of green and brown to bring out the portrait hiding therein.
Other maps beg misreading, too. The earliest manuscript on view at the Newberry, a portolan chart by the Majorcan cartographer Petrus Roselli from 1456, is criss-crossed with rhumb lines meant to help a sailor navigate in a constant cardinal direction across the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They could be rhumba steps, for all I understand. Half a millennium later, the experimental composer John Cage created an unexpected lookalike by drawing with colored markers on a map of Chicago. Each of his 128 lines connects two random addresses and is labelled for a different dance step. Cage, at least, probably wouldn’t have minded my getting lost while interpreting his score.
Graticules are another type of line that appears on maps, gridding longitude and latitude. They’re always there, even when not visible, like a geometric skeleton on which the body of the planet hangs. Surprisingly flexible, graticules allow mapmakers to spin the globe around and make just about anywhere the focal point of the universe, as in a 1739 hand-colored world map centered on Paris, complete with handy sidebars explaining how to measure the distance from the French capital to everywhere else. In 1979, the great Hungarian-American land artist Agnes Denes pushed the limits of graticules a million miles further, diagramming pyramidal, cubic, donut, and other-shaped Earths, a series of alternative realities still recognizably familiar.
Most Chicagoans possess an inborn understanding of graticules, the city being one big grid of north-south, east-west streets with a zero-zero point at the intersection of State and Madison. But just as graticules have a mathematical neutrality easily manipulated by real-world forces — Paris is only the center of the world for the French, after all — so too does the Chicago grid. All quadrants are not equal in this, one of America’s most segregated cities. Documenting corresponding North and South Side addresses, as Tonika Lewis Johnson does in her ongoing “Folded Map Project,” reveals much about systemic disinvestment. The 6900 block of North Ashland in Edgewater looks profoundly unlike the 6900 block of South Ashland in Englewood, despite both being residential neighborhoods of similar vintage. Frank conversation and new social bonds result when Johnson arranges for “map twins,” the residents of paired homes, to meet.
A bridge to segregation? Englewood photographer introduces neighbors on opposite sides of Chicago
“Mapping Outside the Lines” includes plenty of other examples of the social, economic, and political aspects of mapmaking. Boundaries merit an entire section and include a WWI-era chart of Europe divided according to major ethnicities, minor ones be damned; an 1858 map of Louisiana graphed into tidy rectangles to ease westward expansion; and a Spanish diagram of the Western Indies from the early 1600s that divvied it up between Spain and Portugal, despite the fact that the land was claimed by Indigenous people who already lived there, and that the Spanish hadn’t ever been. Legal fictions, all of them, that had enormous impacts on world history and individual lives, and continue to do so. Updates might include recent controversies about redistricting and gerrymandering across the U.S., as well as lethal border disputes in places as far-flung as Israel, Ukraine, Kashmir, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The real world, it turns out, is a whole lot messier than mapmakers, and their commissioners, would have us believe. That can make it hard to actually get places, hence the extreme simplicity of Massimo Vignelli’s famed 1978 New York City subway map and innovations like strip maps. First popularized in John Ogilby’s Britannia atlas of 1698, strip maps are oriented to a trip’s start and end points, and narrowly follow convenient highways, rail lines, or flight paths. They look uncannily like smart phone nav apps, and so the journey comes full circle.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
“Mapping Outside the Lines” runs through February 14 at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., 312-943-9090 and www.newberry.org