From the Publisher. Collected for the first time, Maps presents 39 of the celebrated graphic designer's obsessively detailed, highly personal cartographic creations. Paintings as tall as 12 feet depict continents, countries, and cities swirling in torrents of information and undulating with colorful layers of hand-painted boundry lines, place names, and provocative cultural commentary. Read Author Q&A with Designers & Books.
Since the 1990s, in what I imagine to be her 15 minutes per day of free time, Pentagram partner Paula Scher has been painting massive maps of her own imagination. The colorful tapestries with type rendered in all-caps look like imaginative wayfinding but they function more like infographics, their visual hierarchies layered with not only place names but details like trade routes, zip codes, transit lines. The book takes a cue from Google Maps, giving one image of the full-sized painting and one that zooms in to a detail, where you can almost see Scher’s hand meticulously cramming in the name of every city in Uruguay, eventually spilling out into the Atlantic Ocean in waves. As the book progresses, Scher gets more topical (and more political) painting not only places but events like the 2000 Florida election results, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or mapping out the history of the term “weapons of mass destruction.” As art, it’s gorgeous; as a process, it’s a lesson in obsession; and as a narrative, it’s storytelling at its best.
Library Availability provided by WorldCat
- University of Kansas
- Lawrence, KS 66045 United States
- 114 miles
- map
- libr info
- Oklahoma State University Library
- Stillwater, OK 74078 United States
- 130 miles
- map
- libr info
- Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
- Kansas City, MO 64111 United States
- 149 miles
- map
- libr info
- University of Missouri-Kansas City
- Kansas City, MO 64110 United States
- 149 miles
- map
- libr info
- University of Central Oklahoma
- Edmond, OK 73034 United States
- 160 miles
- map
- libr info
- University of Oklahoma
- Norman, OK 73019 United States
- 194 miles
- map
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- Daniel Boone Regional Library
- Columbia, MO 65203 United States
- 258 miles
- map
- libr info
- Wayne State College
- Wayne, NE 68787 United States
- 292 miles
- map
- libr info
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