The Maps as Art: Exhibition and Book

Brooklyn Day Dress by Meridith McNeal,
NYC Transit maps and mannequin

Christopher Henry and Katherine Harmon have co-curated a lovely show titled: Maps as Art. The show is meant to dovetail with the launch of Katherine Harmon’s new book, Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography.

If you don’t recognize Katherine Harmon by name you will by her good works, Harmon has been steadily producing interesting art books out her Seattle-based, Tributary Books. Tributary has put out such titles as Blackstock’s Collections: The Drawings of an Artistic Savant and, keeping with the cartographic, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.

The Christopher Henry Gallery is a five year old exhibition space is located in a beautiful two story building (a former church?) just off of the Bowery in the Lower East Side. Firmly positioned in the vanguard of the migration of galleries away from the high rents of Chelsea, the Christopher Henry Gallery serves as a perfect example of why it’s totally charming to encounter art in a neighborhood that is not entirely an art mall.

The curatorial statement describe their exhibition:

In the guise of offering illumination, maps obscure. They purport to bring order to the fundamental chaos of life, promising clarity in the face of flux, and claiming knowledge of the unknowable. In their quest to demarcate our differences, they comfort us even as they give the lie to the notion of common experience.

The exhibition features work by Doug Beube, Matthew Cusick, Joshua Dorman, Jerry Gretzinger, Ingo Gunther, Jane Hammond, Emma Johnson, Karey Kessler, Joyce Kozloff, Hayato Matsushita, Meridith McNeal, Florent Morellet, Vik Muniz, Aga Ousseinov, Matthew Picton, Karin Schaefer, Dannielle Tegeder, Heidi Whitman, and Jeff Woodbury.

For many more images of the show, follow after the jump.

Vik Muniz

Fault Lines by Doug Beube

Dannielle Tegeder, her futurist map drawings have got moxy!

Hayato Matsushita

This amazing book Parallel Optics Zoom +/- is by Doug Beube.

Emma Johnson, Dislocation: British Isles

Vest for a New World by Doug Beube

And of course, this is the amazing Jane Hammond.

The show closes very soon (I guess everyone is headed to Miami with high hopes), but the book can be read at your leisure (which is why I’ve put it on my wish list, hint-hint).

If you are hungry for more information about this show, Listen to a podcast of this Brian Lehrer radio show on WNYC where he interviews Katherine Harmon.

And lastly, I wasn’t able credit all the work in this post, if recognize the artist’s work please let me know and I will update the post.

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