Véronique Plesch – Introduction Fall 2026: Mapping

On 4 September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the draft resolution “Correct the Map,” aimed at rebalancing global cartographic standards and promoting equitable proportions for the world’s regions, particularly Africa. The resolution was adopted by 164 countries, with six abstentions—leaving the United States completely alone as the sole vote against.

Spearheaded by Togo and a coalition of African nations, the resolution seeks to redress the distortions of the Mercator projection, the map we are all used to seeing. Created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, it was aimed specifically for ocean navigation. As a three-dimensional globe is projected (that is, flattened) onto a two-dimensional surface, a certain amount of distortion occurs. Mercator designed his map specifically for ocean navigation, preserving straight compass lines and local landmass outlines. To maintain these true shapes and angles, landmasses closer to the poles are vastly enlarged while equatorial regions are shrunk by comparison.

As Togo’s representative argued before the Assembly, this spatial bias is far from trivial: “Today, the issue of mapping as a cognitive tool deserves our collective attention . . . How do we represent the world? How do we teach it? How do generations learn to see our planet?” Indeed, a map is never a neutral instrument. Because a fair projection “changes how we see the world,” adopting balanced alternatives—such as the Equal Earth projection encouraged by the UN—paves the way for “greater understanding, respect, and peace among nations.” It is precisely this relationship between cartographic representation, power, and perception that frames many of the essays gathered in this issue. Our contributors stress how cartography is first and foremost a representation and thus fundamentally distinct from objective reality. As a creative activity, mapping involves choices that are determined by purpose, agenda, and often bias.

For multidisciplinary artist Billy Gérard Frank, maps are both “unstable and errant forms” and profound conceptual frameworks, intimately tied to his seafaring upbringing on Petite Martinique, his father’s legacy as a shipwright, and his own transnational identity. The cartographic distortion at the core of the UN resolution is echoed by Frank, who approaches maps as objects that “reveal as much through what they omit, distort, or leave unmapped as they do through what they claim to document.” Tracing oceanic archives across the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa—and drawing directly on his current research at Maine’s Osher Map Library—his series Indigo: Entanglements fuses indigo pigment, historical map fragments, colonial newsprint, and 18th-century portraiture. By layering counter-narratives over these archival relics, Frank dismantles the visual authority of colonial maritime wealth, uncovering the violence obscured beneath the surface while honoring Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and the embodied memories of ancestral loss, labor, and exile.

Similarly, Molly Holmberg Brown recognizes the fallacy that maps represent: “Maps lie. None of them are true. None of them are correct.” For Edgar Allen Beem, Holmberg Brown’s background in cartography—a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship right after college led her to study cartography on several continents, followed by a PhD in geography—is central to her visual practice. Her venture, MollyMaps, sits at the intersection of cartography, fine art, and ecological awareness. Rather than serving as functional tools for navigation, her paintings act as “mental maps” and emotional landscapes designed to orient viewers to a deep, experiential sense of place. Her creations emphasize the interconnectedness of natural systems—a sensitivity further amplified in recent 3D embroidered works and digital collaborations with cartographer Margot Carpenter.

Carl Little locates Jane Crosen’s work within Maine’s pictorial map tradition—a genre that has a long history and in which artists include “vignettes and illustrations.” His brother David is so fond of maps that the brothers consistently feature them in their co-authored volumes (this MAJ editor bumped into David at a lecture this summer by Earle Shettleworth on the pictorial maps of Mildred G. Burrage, another great Maine artist and creator of pictorial maps). Little recounts Crosen’s background, training in techniques of map production, from analog to digital, and work for a range of outlets, commissioned and creative. Ultimately, as Crosen notes, “every map tells its own story about a place.”

Writing in our Insight/Incite column dedicated to art in educational contexts, Natasha Mayers reflects on her work as a touring artist for the Maine Arts Commission. Grounded in her long engagement with maps in her own art, Mayers has guided hundreds of school and community projects over the last quarter-century. Drawing from cartography as a “form of storytelling and claiming space,” and a platform for “discovery and interaction” that teaches us “to think about the real world on both the abstract and concrete level,” her projects give shape to history, foster community, and raise awareness about local life.

Claire Millikin considers the recent ecologically focused exhibit Holdfast!: A Seaweed Art Exhibition (curated by Celeste Roberge and Ian Ellis at The Warehouse in Rockland) ), exploring how artists address climate change and ocean life at the “edge of America where land meets ocean.” Seaweed becomes emblematic of that zone. Millikin reviews the work of a few artists among the thirty in the exhibition in which “the question of the mapping function of image is leveraged, illuminated, and interrogated.” Through exploratory technical processes, these artists manipulate scale—a fundamental element of cartography—as their works function as forms of spatial and ecological mapping. Millikin posits that the works of Rosalba Breazeale, Dave Wade, Nicole Wolf, Nanci Kahn + Meredith Kennedy, verónica a. pérez, and Celeste Roberge trace shifting coastlines, environmental degradation, and historic loss while asking how we might “hold fast through all the challenges facing this place.”

In Ronald Leax’s “analogical mapping practice,” the studio is a “base camp of physical stuff” where matter, imagination, and conceptual inquiry collide. Leax discusses the “systems of perception, interpretation, and application” that underpin his thought process and their materialization in his works, which draw on the form of the terrestrial globe and explore the tension between material reality and human knowledge systems. Informed by philosophical inquiries into being, bias, and purpose, Leax posits that epistemological frameworks are inherent constructs to be tested, viewing his individual physical creations as “blaze marks” and his broader body of work as a tentative “map to the real.”

Véronique Plesch and David L. Simon chart the life and legacy of sculptor Harriett Matthews (1940–2026), examining how her extensive travels fueled a career dedicated to mapping space, human memory, and physical landscape. From the meticulous urban topographies drawn from her Greek rooftop terrace to her heavy metal sculptures capturing ethereal clouds and sacred roadside shrines or her minute bronze reliefs depicting multifaceted vistas, Matthews translated architectural and organic environments into grounded, enduring forms. Whatever the medium, her body of work offers a rich cartography of human experience, physical movement, and spatial devotion. (See the reminiscences by students and colleagues in this issue.)

Stuart Kestenbaum reflects on cartography as both a lost physical artifact and a vital metaphor for the creative process. Moving from nostalgic memories of folded paper road maps stacked in the glove compartment to our modern blind trust in GPS, Kestenbaum observes how easy it is to forget that “[t]he world is so much bigger and mysterious than the frameworks [we] place on top of it.” Wandering becomes a metaphor for creation, a discovery of one’s own terra incognita. For the poet, “[e]ach poem might start as its own map.” Todd Watts similarly draws on the theme of movement and travel as he reminisces about a brief roadside stop surrounded by desert wildlife only to return to his vehicle “confounded by the highway’s scarring of this peaceful place” as he rejoins the relentless parade of traffic heading east.

Five colleagues and former students (Abbott Meader, Tom Higgins, Duncan Hewitt, James Ffrench, and Luke Johnson) map out Harriett Matthews’s career, her life in Maine, and her enduring legacy as an artist, mentor, friend, and steadfast presence both at Colby College and in their lives. These essays reveal Matthews’s profound impact and how she modeled an unflinching work ethic and commitment to making art.

A similar kind of artistic genealogy is charted in our poetry section, where Poetry Editor Betsy Sholl, herself a former Maine Poet Laureate (2006–10), selected pieces by the former and current Maine Poets Laureate, Julia Bouwsma (2021–26) and Dawn Potter (2026–; as a side note, our contributor Stuart Kestenbaum also held this honorary position, 2016–20). Both Bouwsma and Potter have a “strong attachment to the land and to Maine,” and both offer a kind of mapping as they explore one’s relationship to the land and its history. Bouwsma’s two poems from her recent collection, Death Fluorescence, accompanied by her photographs, confront both ecological resilience and ancestral erasure, tracking how human presence and inherited silences remain bound to the land “lichen to lesion, light to ligament, rock to rib.” Potter’s two poems “map literal spaces” but also emotional geography—a long train ride and the course of a brook. Space and time, past and present, family and strangers, cities and countryside, home and away are given a spot within the space of her poems.

Past and present are also woven together (both metaphorically and literally) in the work of Rachel Sperry, selected this quarter by Photography Editor Rose Marasco, who notes that Sperry’s “photographic images are a personal mapping of her life and a generational mapping of her family.” Marasco also points out the similarities between the photographic medium and cartography as “both depict the three-dimensional world and shift it into a two-dimensional world.”

In her quarterly Art Historical Musings, Véronique Plesch explores how mapping transcends the reality of objective topography to function as a profound reflection of human belief, psychology, memory, and political power. Tracing cartography from prehistoric cave paintings and medieval mappa mundi to contemporary works by Maya Lin and Grayson Perry, Plesch demonstrates that “every map is ultimately a fiction,” aimed at “shaping belief, organizing cognition, and structuring human experience.” Whether charting political legitimacy, emotional landscapes, or environmental loss, the “cartographic impulse” serves as a universal attempt to impose human order upon the unmappable.

David Whalen ponders whether David Dewey’s plein-air watercolors are “a form of mapmaking.” He notes the recurring presence of “markers such as posts, masts, and pilings” that act “like pins pushed into a map.” While such features provide visual anchoring, Dewey’s handling of the watercolor medium, with its distinctive liquidity and radiance, conveys impermanence. In the end, Dewey maps far more than straightforward physical geography or even “the way he sees the world,” creating works that delineate “that ineffable place where the external world and inner life meet.”

The Fall 2026 UMVA Members Showcases highlight the opportunities afforded by cartography as an expressive mode. In our first Showcase, Dan Mills discusses his current exhibition at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine. Visceral Cartography: Projects on Colonialism, Conflict, and Culture features close to ninety of his compositions and documents his modus operandi. Drawing on four decades of research and archival materials, Mills layers paint and collaged elements to explore topical issues including colonialism, conflict, and “place-based histories and narratives that are absent from or undermined by mainstream media.” Janelle Delicata, who teaches at a maritime college, draws from “[c]harts, maps, plotting graphs, and checklists” to construct her Voyages series. Sharing the realization that “lists are a kind of map” (even one as mundane as a shopping list!), Delicata reflects on how we “are constantly trying to organize and order our lives and environments.” Amy Bellezza uses maps as both background and support for photographic snapshots of her own kitchen. As she inserts the personal domestic realm within the larger scale of the state, while alluding to the four seasons, Bellezza connects “the natural world outside with the warmth and memories of home inside.” Ultimately, she aims at translating her “sense of belonging—not simply to a place, but to a landscape, a community, and a home.”

The second Showcase continues the exploration of cartography through personal geography, political imagination, and historical layering. Shaped by the experience of her childhood memories and favorite books taking in her mind the form of maps, Alison Hildreth believes that “[m]aps help us graphically understand the environment we live in.” Her work is a “form of aerial mapping,” her surroundings seen as if she were “a giant bird circling the terrain below and recording it in [her] own visual language.” Noah Apple stepped away from “the martial art of propaganda” to construct collaged vision-maps of imaginary cities, challenging himself to build a visual vocabulary that could “imagine something better”, to map “a new geography of hope.” Finally, Jon Taner updates mid-century prints from a Maurice Utrillo catalog using watercolor and collage to capture “the changing map of places that were once there,” visually layering “the ceaseless passages of time, immigration, and generations.”

In the third Showcase, the cartographic framework encompasses history and politics, intimate domestic spaces, and human expression. We read about the role cartography has always played for Paula Gerstenblatt (a two-time Osher Map Fellow) and how it offers her a “visual vocabulary [for] exploring place, memory, identity,” physical and inner landscapes. She shares work from her recent exhibition at the Maine Jewish Museum in which she maps out the “complexity and nuance of an emotionally charged landscape of contested spaces” as she goes back in time—millennia—to reach today’s situation in Israel and neighboring areas. As with previous work of hers, Transversals addresses “how individual narratives anchor collective ones, and how collective histories shape the personal.” For Faylinda Kodis as well, “geography, memory, and personal history intersect” in her work. Maine is at once “a physical place and a place of memory,” and in her Still Life Journeys series maps link the domestic with the outside world. The US Geological Survey map fragments she incorporates bridge “the intimate world of the still life to the larger world beyond it,” using small topographical sections to “suggest an entire landscape that remains largely outside the frame.” For Charlotte Agell, “[t]he human face is a map: a map of feelings, a map of aging, a map of the self.” Agell is fascinated by “the cartography of a child’s face,” striving to record fleeting emotional states and map “feelings, not just form.”

In our last Showcase, four artists turn cartographic forms into subjective expressions to interrogate national consciousness and political power, commemorate personal histories, and chart the human condition. Peggy Diggs approaches cartography as a symbolic tool to “identify, typify, name, or characterize,” appropriating the readily recognizable contours of the US to produce “metaphorical portraits” of the nation. Natasha Mayers, for whom “[a]n empathetic response requires imagination,” creates “subjective, intuitive, emotional, inaccurate maps” in her State of War series, disrupting the bucolic Maine landscape with explosions, military machinery, and sudden scale shifts. Her painted cartographies invite viewers to navigate a world in chaos, “get lost” in it but also “find a way out.” Mary Becker Weiss, as well, uses maps as conduits for personal expression, transforming literal cartography into “landscapes of emotion, empathy, and positivity” and an exploration of memory and nostalgia. Jane Page-Conway uses encaustic to explore the functional and tactile nature of maps while reflecting her fascination with the diverse visual systems used to chart paths, track weather, and navigate the physical world.

In our regular quarterly report on UMVA initiatives, ARRT! (Artists’ Rapid Response Team!) shares its recent work collaborating with progressive groups to create visually compelling banners, props, and signage for advocacy across Maine. This quarter’s efforts featured two primary community engagements: participating in the Whitefield Independence Day Parade with the satiric “Grift Shop” theme and providing painting materials and guidance for activists protesting a proposed Amazon warehouse in Gorham. Expanding this visual activism into the digital realm, LumenARRT! shares videos from two powerful site-specific interventions from this summer. In Biddeford, they projected a deeply moving, elegiac memorial across public facades to honor the memory of twenty-five-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, reimagining public architecture as a space of collective mourning and remembrance. LumenARRT! also projected dynamic, large-scale video works focused on nonpartisan voter engagement, utilizing light as electronic graffiti to activate civic space ahead of upcoming elections. The quarterly report of the UMVA highlights the major Dreaming at Dawn exhibition in Bangor, shares a call for textile-based works for Soft Objects for Hard Times in Portland, and previews the upcoming winter exhibition Connections in Brunswick.

Debuted in our Spring issue, our feature Right Now! Processing the Moment drew a cornucopia of submissions, proving to be a vital forum for our readers to express their reactions to the state of the country and the world. Responding to the moment are Shelby Arnold, Michael Branca, Peter Buotte, Norajean Ferris, Natasha Mayers, Asif Shaikh, Stargazer, Elizabeth Starr, Michael Torlen and Kenny Cole, Nora Tryon, Tim Van Hook, and Mark Wethli.

Returning to our theme of Mapping, UMVA Archives finds Tony Owen contemplating how we orient ourselves when familiar ground shifts. Reframed through the daily rituals of a newly adopted rescue collie mapping out fresh territory, Owen reflects on Pam Burr Smith’s 1984 painting Red Dog and her 1990 Union newsletter journal entries on the unpredictable alchemy of art making, reminding us that even the best maps must leave room for the uncharted and the silent present.

Whether through the rigorous interrogation of historical maps, the re-stitching of personal genealogies, or the imaginative construction of alternative futures, the contributors gathered in this issue demonstrate that cartography is never a neutral representation of objective facts. Instead, mapping remains a profoundly human attempt to locate ourselves in space, to set and challenge boundaries, and to give tangible shape to internal realities. From the vast spatial bias of global projections to the quiet cartography of a child’s face or a dog sniffing out a new field, these essays remind us that every map is both an abstraction and a story. In charting our journeys, memories, and collective struggles, the artists in this issue show that while maps may help us navigate where we are, it is the creative act of mapping itself that allows us to discover where we might go.

 

References

#Correct the Map

United Nations. “General Assembly Adopts Text to ‘Correct the Map’, among Others Proclaiming Decade of Culture for Sustainable Development, Child Marriage Elimination Day,” Meetings Coverage, GA/12779, 4 September 2026.

United Nations General Assembly. “‘Correct the map’: rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world’s regions, particularly Africa.” Draft resolution, A/80/L.104, 4 August 2026.