UMVA Members Showcase – Fall 2026: Alison Hildreth, Noah Apple, Jon Taner.

Alison Hildreth

Since the beginning of recorded history (and likely before) mankind has been making maps. Going back in time to ancient Babylon, the discovery of a 7500-year-old map of the world confirms the belief that maps have been central to our understanding of the environment. There is speculation that in some of the prehistoric caves there are marks that could be maps or indications of certain places. Maps help us graphically understand the environment we live in. In fact, the urge to map is so basic that when I think about my early childhood I see myself situated in a map. The pond is here and the house is nearby and the woods are behind the pond. The two branches of the Charles River were on either side of where we lived. I see it in terms of a map, which is the way we understand where we are in relation to everything else.

And not only maps of the physical surroundings but maps in books. Wind in the Willows: down the river with Ratty and Mole, arriving at the residence of Toad, and going on the road trip with him. Pinocchio and Winnie the Pooh had very map-like adventures, too. As children, we lived in those maps, not just what was in the book but what we imagined. So much of what I remember growing up I remember by visualizing the maps of the narrative: going to the Heffalump pit with Pooh and Piglet and into the woods with Owl. Alice through the Looking Glass was perhaps the scariest read with the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat. Alice led us from adventure to adventure, each one vivid in a young person’s imagination. I still recall travels through the Looking Glass. As I got older I read Lassie Come Home, about the dog that trekked across England to come home and the Narnia stories. Sadly, The Lord of the Rings had not yet been written because it is a book I would have loved.

I went to four different schools in four different towns before college, and each exists first and foremost in my mind as a map. The grounds, the hallways, the classrooms—I could go down the halls even now into my first grade classroom—even where I sat in the classroom.

The most long-lasting influence came from a course I took in college, Landscape Architecture. This was the first time I had to make architectural drawings of what I had observed. We recorded the gardens and parks that our professor took us to in the form of architectural drawings. This required mechanical drawing and math to render the drawings. I found it very difficult, but it has stayed with me for all these years, and in the last fifteen or so years, I have returned to a form of aerial mapping in my work. I see my surroundings as though I am a giant bird circling the terrain below and recording it in my own visual language. My formats have varied. Some of the largest drawings are about 38 inches by 84 inches, and the smaller ones are 18 inches by 55 inches. The work is mainly on Kitikata paper, but I have also done some oil paintings ranging in size from 72 inches tall to 38 inches wide.

Recently I have become quite obsessed with deep space, and if I were the slightest bit mathematically inclined, I would have loved to have been an astrophysicist. The thought of roaming around through the stars seems thrilling. However, fascinated as I am by the wonders of black holes and nebulae and dark matter, I find it impossible to record those images in the work I have been doing. Possibly the problem for me is that there aren’t lines in space. When I am out on Vinalhaven Island I stargaze every clear night. There is no ambient light and the sky is a miracle with the Milky Way brightly proceeding from horizon to horizon. The constellations are visible and the whole experience is like viewing a heavenly map. I have never tired of it. There is always something new to see in my map of the sky.

 

Noah Apple – Another World is Possible: Mapping a New Geography of Hope

This winter, one of my high school students challenged me to show a body of brand-new work at their parents’ cafe. I said: “Yes, I’ll make small carefully framed collages rather than giant propaganda posters and paintings.”

I had been working fairly hard at bullying Andrew Cuomo through an all-out obsessive public propaganda campaign fueled by a nearly unending supply of rage. Rage that yet another scumbag man was going to waltz right into a position of extremely powerful executive control (New York City Mayor) right after I had watched a pedophile sex criminal become President . . . again. There are so many things to rage against, and we need to take our rage and use it to stop all forms of monstrosity, but I did take a two-and-a-half-month break in the darkest time of winter to make a body of work that challenged me to imagine something better.

New and imaginary cities! It turns out this was hard. Imagining new worlds to come takes practice and building new and different muscles and new visual and poetic vocabulary—different from the martial art of propaganda. So, for a few months, while the world burned around me, I focused on imagining new worlds. Hopeful places, cities that existed in the future, and places that had a secure foothold in the future.

I feel like I just scratched the surface, and there is so much more room for me to learn and develop in this direction. I’m back to making propaganda at the moment, and waiting for the dark depths of winter to draw me back into the mapping of hope.

 

Jon Taner

When I was a youth, nearly every other friend or neighbor’s home had a print of a European street scene or riverbank. Reproductions of paintings by or inspired by an Impressionist or Post-Impressionist artist, were popular.

I came across a catalog of paintings by French artist Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955), with its European street scenes. It reminded me of the prints of villages that hung in those homes as well as my own. When revisiting those pages, I was motivated to bring the old images into the present by enhancing them with color and collage. The captured era demanded an update.

By applying watercolor, collaged images from printed media, and my own repurposed work to pages from the catalog, I conveyed the changing map of places that were once there. An added sun or moon that was missing in Utrillo’s works, new trees, signage, windows, and facelifts on old streets and buildings depict the ongoing process of change while keeping memories. Each work layers the ceaseless passages of time, immigration, and generations.