Maps at an Exhibition: Minding the Material Gap

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Notes

1 Aside from having served in an advisory capacity on several planning teams, the most recent being Crossings: Mapping American Journeys (Newberry Library, 2022), my thoughts are informed by having worked as visiting curator at the Winterthur Museum, Delaware, when preparing the exhibition, Common Destinations. Maps in the American Experience (2013). See the exhibition website, http://commondestinations.winterthur.org/.

2 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.

3 For examples of research engaging with the materiality of maps see Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) and most recently, the essay, ‘Map, Paper, Prints: A Conversation about Mark Catesby’s Natural History and Material Culture,’ Winterthur Portfolio 56, no. 4 (2022): 185—202. For sample work addressing the material qualities of maps see Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Diane Dillon, ‘Consuming Maps,’ in Maps: Finding our Place in the World, eds. James R. Akerman and Robert Karrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 289–343; David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); or, Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

4 For a visual proxy of the Evans map in silk, see Common Destinations, http://commondestinations.winterthur.org/files/2013/06/L2012_1045_004-web.jpg

5 For more details, see Brückner, The Social Life of Maps, especially chapter one and seven.

6 See the provocative ideas collected in Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2016).