At age 7, Sammy Muench mapped the five boroughs of New York City. He takes us high above the metro area providing an expansive view of the surrounding region. Through the use of big, bold marks, he also captures a sense of the city’s chaotic order, and the main routes he and his family travel.
The title of this post, I know you love Manhattan, but you ought to look up more often, is from Frank O’Hara’s poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” In it, O’Hara imagines a conversation with the sun who chides the poet for not looking up enough to acknowledge the world above the street level. While viewing Sammy’s map, we take on the gaze of the sun staring down on the entire New York area. We can even focus on Fire Island in the far right margin of the drawing where O’Hara was lazily lounging in his poem.