Picturing the World, Around Us

Maps Have Always Worked On More Than One Level: There's the You-Are-Here That Lets Us See Where We Are and Where We're Going. And There's the We-Are-Here That Lets Us Say It.

CHICAGO - To Inuits in the late 1800s, a map was a piece of wood with carved gnarls and pocks representing the coastal inlets of Greenland.

To ancient Greeks and early Europeans, maps were flights of fancy and horror, showing beautiful beasts and savage humans of uncharted lands.

Eighteenth-century Buddhists saw maps as moral charts juxtaposing landscapes of men's sensual desires and "infinite space." New World colonizers used maps as tools of conquest and empire, distorting size and shape to serve their self-interest.

No matter the age, maps have always inspired that eternal human penchant for dreaming of far-off places, for locating oneself in the universe. As vessels of wishful thinking, they transform us into explorers lured by the mystery of the unknown, if not a lust to conquer it.

Pursuits and desires such as these are at the core of the Festival of Maps here, billed as the largest, most diverse cartographic exposition in U.S. history. "Maps: Finding Our Place in the World," which is one part of the Chicago festival, will open in March at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Although computer and satellite technology seem to cast a cold, hard light on our physical realm, people still turn to maps to feed their imagination, festival organizers say -- whether through collecting and studying ancient maps, using modern mapping technology in creative and interactive ways or making cartographically inspired art. Rather than distance us from cartography, technology has made mapping part of our everyday lives -- in driving, in fashion, even in political protest.

"It turns out almost any man on the street you talk to says they love maps," says Anna Siegler, who was hired to coordinate the festival by her friend Barry MacLean, one of the world's top collectors, with more than 20,000 maps.

The love of maps is "this quietly held passion [that] people have," says Siegler, wearing an Hermes scarf emblazoned with a map of the world's rivers.

"The advent of digital mapping -- Google, MapQuest -- means more people use maps more often, and that's stimulating interest in cartography," says Diane Dillon, a co-curator of the Newberry Library's "Mapping Manifest Destiny" exhibit. "Disciplines like geography have fallen by the wayside, but digital mapping is bringing it in through the back door. It makes geography fun."

Launched in November and continuing through mid-2008, the privately run festival involves exhibitions in more than 30 Chicago institutions, from independent art galleries to major institutions such as the Field Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

More than 800 maps and related objects are being showcased, from a 1300 B.C. clay tablet mapping the Babylonian city of Nippur (in present-day Iraq) to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's ongoing mapping of the galaxies. Cartographic paraphernalia include a pocket globe and a pocket astrolabe, a gadget once brandished by wealthy Englishmen seeking the time of day through a map of the stars. Such was its cachet that Marvin Bolt, an Adler Planetarium astronomy historian, calls it "the 16th-century iPhone."

The idea for the festival was born six years ago during a social gathering that included MacLean, John W. McCarter Jr., president of the Field Museum, and others with an interest in map collecting, history and world travel.

"John said, 'Why don't we have a display at the Field Museum of the 100 greatest maps of all time?' and we started talking about what those would be," says MacLean, president of MacLean-Fogg, a global machine parts manufacturer.