21 February 2014

Marginalia in cARTography

An example of map marginalia, the hard-working Niagara Falls beavers from Herman Moll's
 A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of America (1715).
The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is hosting an exhibit entitled "Marginalia in cARTography" from February 28 to May 18, 2014, in the Leslie and Johanna Garfield Gallery.  Marginalia in cARTography focuses on the artistic images that inhabit the edges, margins, and empty spaces on maps from the middle ages to the twentieth century.  These images, says guest curator and art historian Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, "should be regarded not only as part of the map, but as elements that lead to a better understanding of the region mapped, of the cartographers and their collaborators, of their aesthetic sense, and of the world in which they were made."