This map traces a police chase that grabbed the attention of people living in the Tree Streets neighborhood of Waynesboro, Virginia. One of Tony’s coworkers witnessed part of the chase, and drew this map to show where he was standing when the cars came around a corner.
This is a map worth keeping. Even though it’s not particularly practical for navigation, it’s a cool piece of ephemera with a fun story. A video store clerk drew it for Renee and her boyfriend when they stopped to ask for directions to a popular sushi restaurant. The clerk quickly drew a few lines on the back of a slip of paper used to label videotapes damaged by customers. Even in 2008, this object was a relic of the past. The rendering was not only incredibly vague but also completely wrong. Despite the map, Renee and Bruce eventually found the sushi restaurant. They also kept the piece of paper using it as a bookmark before eventually sending it to the HDMA.
The neighborhood maps I’ve been sharing recently are some of my favorites in the collection. This drawing hits on all of the best qualities of hand-drawn maps. It includes personal recommendations, can be used for navigation, and has a striking visual appearance. Justin drew it for his friends when they were visiting him in Venice, California. They wanted to spend some time checking out what made the neighborhood unique, so he recommended the canals and included his favorite pizza place.
The maps pictured here are of the Fishtown neighborhood in Philadelphia. Like many neighborhoods, there are no true boundaries of the area, and the definition is somewhat malleable. Haughery’s map makes the case that Frankford Avenue can be considered a boundary between Fishtown to the southeast and Kensington to the northwest.
Olah drew the second map for guests attending a party held for Fabric Workshop and Museum apprentices. She idealizes the somewhat confusing layout of streets and highlights the triangular structure of the area where William Penn’s original grid plan for the city breaks down in unexpected ways.
As far as I can tell, this is the first map I collected. Drawn 10 years before I founded the Hand Drawn Map Association, it provides directions to three places in Chicago: the music venues Lounge Ax (now closed) and Empty Bottle, as well as the BFA graduation exhibition for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sadly, I can not remember who drew this map. Whoever it was, they were a SAIC student living in the loft on Wabash Avenue where we stayed. If it was you, please let me know!
After not receiving one of the few daily hiking permits to climb Mt. Whitney via the standard Whitney Trail, an experienced hiker suggested Mark Morey and his friends take the lesser-used Mountaineering Route. He sketched this map for them which they used to navigate the nine-mile route in the early 1990’s.
Mark recounts, “over the next two days, we saw no other people except at the summit. We had a lot of route debate [as well as] the most glorious hike and summit of Whitney. On the way up, we found all of the landmarks drawn on the map, however, on our way down, we realized that none of those were the ones he meant us to find.”
Here a seemingly insignificant object, a cocktail napkin, captures a historic moment in United States history: the presidential primary campaign of Barack Obama. Handwerker, the recipient of the napkin, recounts the story of the object in the style of a museum didactic:
“Born in France, Bernard Bonnet became a United States citizen on July 25, 2007. This made him eligible to vote in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, arguably the most groundbreaking race in that nation’s history. Bonnet, a book buyer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), fervently supported Democratic Senator Barack Obama (American, born 1961), voting in the Texas primary election and caucusing for the candidate on March 4th, 2008. Three days before the caucus, Bonnet attended an exhibition opening at the MFAH, where he created this hand drawn map for his co-worker, Margo Handwerker. A fellow Obama supporter, Handwerker needed directions to the Obama volunteer office on Southmore Blvd. in Houston, Texas.”
With a series of map-making workshops at the Museum of Modern Art less than a week away, I’d like to share some maps of New York City from the archive. While the workshops are not specifically focused on drawing maps of the city, we will be using the museum as a point of reference. This has led me to spend some time thinking about the general geography of the area and how we navigate our way through it as well as how the museum reflects the city surrounding it.
John Hutchison’s map reveals what happens to many of us when traveling in New York. We exit a train somewhere underground and gradually find our way to the surface. While emerging from the cavernous spaces below-ground can be disorienting, New York can be fairly easy to navigate once you reach the street level.
This easy navigation is thanks to the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 which defined much of Manhattan with a regular, consistently numbered grid of streets. As New York grew, the grid extended to other parts of the city though not in quite as regular a fashion.
Janine Nichols reveals this regularity through a series of vertical divisions. She highlights important streets and landmarks from her life in 1980’s New York. It features references to, among other things, her job at 30 Rockefeller Center (floating between 49th and 50th streets), her boyfriend at the time joining the Unification Church (indicated by the term “Moonie’s”), and the Twin Towers near her home as they looked at night.
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.
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.
It is worth noting the connection between Frank O’Hara and the Museum of Modern Art. Before his untimely death in 1966, he worked at the museum first as a front desk clerk and later as a curator. The recently renovated MoMA includes an entire room devoted to O’Hara and notes his practice of writing poetry while on his lunch break. It is an important tribute that brought a smile to my face when I recently visited the new permanent collection.
The Museum of Modern Art features prominently in Shaffer’s map above. In it, she strips away the grid of the city to focus our attention on a series of specific events that took place as she visited MoMA in 2010. We also get a sense of how navigating a city while underground results in much of it being mysterious. Here the white space between Midtown in the upper left and the Lower East Side in the bottom right represents the unknown city experienced from inside a subway car.
If you are in New York, please consider joining the HDMA for one of our map-making workshops in MoMA’s new Creativity Lab. Three of the sessions take place during Free Friday Nights with the remaining workshops on Saturdays. If you aren’t in New York, consider sending us a map documenting your visit to a museum near you.
HDMA founder, Kris Harzinski, will lead a series of map-making workshops at MoMA’s new Creativity Lab. The first two take place this November with additional dates in January and February 2020.
Nov 8
Nov 9
In revisiting the collection of the Hand Drawn Map Association, I decided to start with this map. It is, as best as I can remember, the first hand-drawn map I collected. I rescued it from the trash at the 2000 World Curling Championships held from April 1 to April 9 at the Braehead Arena in Glasgow, Scotland. I traveled there with my father who was promoting the upcoming 2002 World Curling Championships which would be held in Bismarck, North Dakota.
At the time, I had no intention to collect maps but was instead drawn to the object as a souvenir. Years later I was going through some old paperwork and found this map, along with a few others, in a random file folder. This re-finding of the map inspired me to start this website and begin to collect similar maps people draw for one another.
Drawn from memory, it indicates the relative position of Bismarck to the rest of the United States and Canada. The map offers a fairly accurate representation of the Midwest but is less precise in its effort to depict the East Coast. Note, especially, the placement of Pennsylvania. Typical of hand-drawn maps that illustrate great distances, this example also demonstrates a significant scale shift in its representation of Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland.
Memory maps that chart the location of the US states without referencing any additional resources are common. Below is another map of the United States drawn from memory. No glaring misplacements here, but take note of the shape of Oklahoma. Accuracy isn’t really the goal. These maps are not intended for navigation but instead are meant as explanatory tools or tests of personal geographic aptitude.
