Compass Roses: Maps by Artists

Co-Curated by Nadine Wasserman and Renee Piechocki

Compass Roses: Maps by Artists is a national public art project engaging visual, literary, and performing artists to create maps of their communities. Artists are invited to consider and interpret the idea of a map and place in any way they wish. The content of each map is therefore unique and might contain readily recognizable places or imaginary ones or those that have been forgotten or are unfamiliar. This project invites a journey of discovery in which people can traverse, wander, wonder, reflect and share, using an artist’s map as a guide. The maps are free and available to the public on the project website and can be presented in a variety of in-person and digital formats.

We know that reading a map is becoming a lost art and that paper maps are becoming less common. Humans need to hone our directional abilities or we will lose them. Since most people now rely on navigation apps, even when in places like national parks and on the open sea, our directional abilities are at risk. Some studies show that a sense of direction is hindered in the short term after just a few hours of using a GPS.

But maps are not perfect or unbiased. While they are incredibly useful tools, we know they are also an interpretation of our surroundings and they sometimes reflect prejudices and misperceptions. Take for instance how world maps are more reflective of colonialism rather than scale. Sometimes places are intentionally left out of maps. In early 2020, news reports in Pittsburgh exposed how institutions distributed maps to students and visitors excluding neighborhoods like Homewood, Larimer, Uptown and the Hill District. Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods and deliberately removing our neighbors from the map disrupts our community.

We are embarking on this mapping project to increase the breadth and depth of ways to experience places. It’s often easiest to follow a familiar or beaten path but we know that once you’ve taken a wrong turn it’s not so easy to just turn back. Once you get off at the wrong exit or take a different street, you just need to succumb to the journey and see where it takes you. Maybe it takes you to a dead end or a street that suddenly goes in the wrong direction, but meanwhile it affords a new vantage point, a new journey, and just maybe a grand vista where the beauty of a place is suddenly visible. Or perhaps it leads to an entirely different view, one that is ordinary or extraordinary, a park you have never visited, a neighborhood you never walked through, new people to meet, and new shops to browse. The journey reveals an entirely different yet equally compelling story.

Instead of offering moments of discovery by getting lost, this project offers a way for visitors and residents alike to see the city anew through the eyes of visual artists, writers, poets, dancers, actors and musicians. What better way to reveal the hidden places of a city, or even the places we thought we knew well, interpreted anew? This project will invite people to traverse, wander, wonder, reflect and share by using artists’ maps.

The artist cartographers will reveal singular and unique perspectives and interpretations, not just of particular places but of their own minds, moods, and movements. Participants are invited to interpret the map as they would a poem, a musical score or a screenplay, by following, meandering, roaming, and discovering for themselves.

Compass Roses: Maps by Artists was launched in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the 2020 Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. In 2021, the City of Albuquerque’s Public Art Program commissioned the project and hosted an exhibition at the public library.

To inquire about bringing Compass Roses to your community, contact us for more information.