UMVA Members Showcase – Fall 2026: Paula Gerstenblatt, Faylinda Kodis, Charlotte Agell.

Paula Gerstenblatt – Transversals: Reverberations Across Contested Lines

My love for maps began in childhood, rooted in the tactile joy of unfolding a paper AAA map, spinning a globe, or flipping through a street atlas tucked into my parents’ glove compartment. Maps served many purposes—a geographic locator, a guide for my wandering spirit, and, later, in the studio, a part of a visual vocabulary exploring place, memory, identity, and the landscapes we carry inside us alongside the ones we move through. As a two-time Osher Map Fellow at the University of Southern Maine, I deepened my understanding of what constitutes a map, the pretense of its objectivity, and how contemporary artists and cartographers shift traditional constructs and aesthetics. While maps have long informed my art practice, this essay and its accompanying images turn toward one body of work in particular: Transversals: Reverberations Across Contested Lines, exhibited at the Maine Jewish Museum, May–June 2026. 

Welcome to this big, complicated story. How far do you want to go back? To touching tender hearts?

This series was motivated by the tragedy of 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza. Using historic and contemporary maps and brochures from diverse sources, personal photographs, text from my prose and poetry, and other archival materials, I explore the complexity and nuance of an emotionally charged landscape of contested spaces. I am interested in how what we believe to be fixed, absolute, righteous, and undeniable may be more flexible when we shift our orientation to boundaries, borders, and perspective. This work continues my focus on how individual narratives anchor collective ones, and how collective histories shape the personal.

If you want to understand how we got here, dig in—deep. It is a long and large trajectory going back millennia. Years of conquest, resistance, rising, and falling empires, religious wars, exile, changing borders, and claims of contested territories. Words of caution. Words period. Maps. Interpretation. Ghosts everywhere. It’s messy. Good luck.

I researched historic maps from the Ottoman Empire to the present, drawing from a range of perspectives including the BBC, the United Nations, the Palestinian Academic Society, and a Jordanian tourist map of Jerusalem pre-1967. Originally, this exhibition was titled Contested Territories, focusing on the fluidity of borders, complicated trajectories, and diasporic dispersion. However, after my recent visit to Israel, and months in the studio, that title no longer held. The idea of transversals—a line that intersects at least two others—felt more precise. The personal and political. Past and present. Converging. Reverberating.

This is my story of moving, being on the land through decades and life phases. I chose what I chose. I went back. Retraced her steps, looking for her. Imprinted new ones. Wondered about it all. I am still ironing out the details.

As part of my process, I comb through old photos, journals, and personal artifacts. Unexpectedly, I discovered my mother’s journal and photo album from my parents’ trip to Israel in 1992. Tucked under a stack of books in my studio were photos of my daughter and me in Jerusalem in 1998. In a storage area at the family home in California, I uncovered a long-forgotten box filled with Jerusalem Post newspapers from Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, an old bus ticket, a 1977 map of bus routes, business cards from a store in Tel Aviv that no longer exists, poetry in folded sheets of paper, and a series of paintings—People in Boxes—created in 1979 in my former bomb shelter studio, alongside watercolors of Sinai on cheap brown sketch paper.

Ghosts always find us. We can’t hide from them, or ourselves unless we are willing to extract humanity from our souls. It is a steep price.

Stumbling across these precious artifacts, which I thought lost or forgot existed, was like excavating buried memories. I read my mother’s words and stared at photos of my parents from 1992, smiling for the camera in spaces I stood in just weeks before. I ran my finger across faded images of my cousin Kelly, who died thirty years ago, as we clowned with friends on Kibbutz Shefayim—time traveling with ghosts across a place woven emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and creatively into this work.

Maps are storytellers, containers of memory, charting our moving lives and lines, drawn and redrawn. So many tricksters in these maps. The world is not flat and neither are these narratives.

My process involves the deliberate juxtaposition of historic and contemporary maps beneath Mylar sheets. Traced with colored pencils and saturated with oil bars, pastels and pigment sticks, these layers collide with hand-drawn images of objects, animals, ghost symbols, poetry, and text to create a visual language containing humor, mystery, grief, fascination, love, longing, and despair. This reorientation, repetition, and use of the personally significant invite the viewer to explore possibilities beyond the obvious and construct new meanings of their own.

Turns out our hard edges and absolutes are splitting apart—shredded dreams, borers, bodies, illusions and contested claims moving, morphing, colliding across time, space, hearts, minds, and formed identity.

My intention in this body of work is not to represent all sides, but to expand dialog as an artist and scholar whose personal experience traversing Israel marks critical phases of my life and development. These moments parallel milestones of the region, including the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977, when hope felt palpable.

The installation of yellowed, frayed newspapers documenting Sadat’s visit, placed above shredded mounds of maps, newspapers, and cardboard, represents a tension between hope and despair. It is both memory and warning. These are gut-wrenching times, with yet another war shaping the fate of the region and reverberating across the world.

Wounds of the past haunt us. It is tempting to retreat into absolutes or bury our heads in the sand. But perhaps those old newspapers—showing former enemies Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shaking hands—are more than historical artifacts. Perhaps they are a call, in the spirit of James Baldwin, to invent hope every day.

 

Faylinda Kodis

Maps have become an important element in my paintings because they connect the intimate world of the still life to the larger world beyond it. I am drawn to maps not only as representations of place, but as objects that carry ideas of movement, memory, history, and belonging. A map suggests that every place has a location, yet my paintings often bring together objects, images, and references that come from very different places and times. The map becomes a quiet reminder of those connections.

In these paintings, all from the series Still Life Journeys, I use fragments of maps rather than presenting them as complete documents. They may appear as a tabletop, a border, a background, or a layer partially concealed by other elements. I like the physical quality of the maps, the lines, names, roads, water, and topographical markings, and the way they introduce a different kind of visual language into a painting. Against flowers, fruit, birds, vessels, textiles, and other carefully observed or imagined objects, the map provides evidence of an actual world.

The maps also relate to my own sense of place. Since returning to Maine, I have become increasingly interested in the ways geography, memory, and personal history intersect. Maine is both a physical place and a place of memory for me, and maps offer a way to acknowledge that connection without making it the explicit subject of a painting. A small section of a map can suggest an entire landscape that remains largely outside the frame.

 

 Charlotte Agell – Human Topography

The human face is a map: a map of feelings, a map of aging, a map of the self. Babies stare at faces; I do, too. Or at least I look. No human is an island but, in a sense, each of us is . . . Here am I, the face proclaims, a distinct feature in the archipelago of humanity.

When I am drawing quick portraits of kids—at bookstores when I have a new book, at libraries, in schools, at fair—I allow myself to stare. Kids wiggle, kids stare back, kids always have something fascinating to say.

The cartography of a child’s face is something I try to capture in a few quick lines. We adults are more complex territories. The maps of our faces chart our lives, of so many experiences, all etched on the topography of a face.

If I do not know the adult personally, I can make a very fast map. But, often, adults are more self-conscious. We have a certain cartography of self that we wish the world to see. Kids are easier. They are up for the experiment and so it all feels like a looser, yet more genuine, mapping. With kids, a minute and a marker are all it takes.

The land of the face has obvious features. What interests me lies mostly below the surface, showing up as a wrinkle, a twinkle, a twinge—a fleeting entry point into the soul? My portraits map feelings, not just form. When they work, they chart internal realities, the record of one moment in this brief anthropic time.