Mapping

This complex print by Osage artist Norman Akers combines maps and a seascape with other images of European colonialism. He depicts George Washington and Alexander Hamilton—founding statesmen who shaped US policies on land and at sea—as aliens descending on Indigenous land. While Akers’s work tends to focus on territorial borders, this work also visualizes the role of the sea in colonial narratives.

In Norman Akers’s collage-print Landing, the artist expands upon ideas of Oklahoma and Osage culture. Known as Children of the Middle Waters, the Osage have a deep relationship with water, despite being in a land-locked state. Akers illustrates this significance by having a map on the top third of the print. A shotgun house, a vernacular architectural style found in the Caribbean and American South that may have ties to Africa, sits at the bottom of the image. This structure illustrates an aspect of Indigenous and Oklahoman culture and connects it to the African American slave trade.

Amidst the escalating tensions of the Cold War, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller made a map that imagined the world not as a series of national borders but as an interconnected environmental and human space. His Dymaxion airocean map emphasizes the connections between all the continents, with the ocean flowing around them. Color shows the relationship of ecological environments by tracking temperature across the globe. In a period of human divisions, Fuller’s projection emphasized a unified world.

In the early period of maritime exploration, the dangers of travel at sea fascinated and terrified European audiences. This print shows three caravels—small sailing ships—caught in a storm. In the tumultuous sea, a group of fanciful sea monsters poses another threat to the sailors hanging from the ships’ rigging. One sea monster is ridden by a sea god with a harp, showing how mythological associations with the sea informed how people imagined actual sea voyages.

The port town of Antwerp, where this print was made, was an influential trading center in the 16th century. This print was most likely made in response to an emerging interest in local and international trade and travel. Along with omitting references to specific countries to appeal to a broader audience, the artists included the mythical figure Arion, seen at the bottom right, as a reference to the intrigue surrounding the ocean.

The Rotch or Roach family were among the most prosperous whalers in New England during the 19th century. Their ships hunted whales for the precious resources of oil and ivory, bringing wealth to the region and illuminating and decorating American homes. However, the extractive process of harvesting whales devastated marine populations, contributing to lasting changes in ocean ecologies.

This ship appears to be in distress, but it is not. Crew aboard the William Roach are butchering a sperm whale after a successful hunt. The ship’s tilt is from the weight of the blubber sheet peeled off during the "cutting in” process. The smoke comes from "trying out,” a term that refers to heating the blubber. Only the blubber, oil, and a few teeth will be harvested while the rest of the whale will be abandoned to the sharks already surrounding the vessel.

A projection is a series of calculations that translates the curving three-dimensional shape of the globe onto the flat surface of a paper map. Developed by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, this particular projection was meant to assist maritime navigation. For this reason, it turns the arcing lines crossing meridians into straight lines. As a result, the relative sizes of landmasses in relation to each other are distorted, providing a skewed vision of the world.  

Imperial expansion fueled the desire for more efficient ways to navigate the seas. British Parliament passed an act that rewarded anyone who found a way to accurately calculate longitude at sea. The prospect of financial gain inspired more than mathematicians, clockmakers, and sea captains. Hogarth’s print shows a well-known London mental institution where a patient behind the doorway draws a globe on the wall; he has gone mad in his quest to find the calculation.

Young girls in English and American boarding schools cultivated their learning through crafting three-dimensional needlework samplers displaying maps of the world and the constellations. While geography and navigation are often thought of as masculine spheres of knowledge, these small objects reveal that girls and women also studied maps and accounts of maritime travel. The material as well as the form of these globes connected their makers to a world of exploration and trade as they stitched using silk thread imported from China.