Mapping Memory, the exhibition of 16th-century indigenous maps at the University of Texas at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art that I told you about last month, wraps up this weekend. If you need more information to help you decide whether to visit, here are writeups from Atlas Obscura and Hyperallergic.
The Blanton Museum has also released a short video about the exhibition.
For a closer look at the Teozacualco Map (above), see this site.
Update: NPR story.
Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-century Mexico, a new exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, presents “a selection of maps, known as Mapas de las Relaciones Geográficas, created by Indigenous artists around 1580. These unique documents show some of the visual strategies used by native communities for the endurance and perseverance of their cultures throughout the so-called colonial period and well beyond.” Opened 29 June; runs until 25 August.
Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State, which opened on 20 April at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, “traces the cartographic history of Texas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries” through a small (26 item) collection of maps and documents, all of which are reproductions. Press release. [WMS]
At the Grolier Club in New York, Westward the Course of Empire: Exploring and Settling the American West, 1803-1869, an exhibition of maps from the collection of J. C. McElveen Jr. 50 maps on display, including Lewis and Clark’s map of the Northwest. Press release. [WMS]
The Texas A&M University Libraries has acquired a rare copy of Stephen F. Austin’s 1830 map of Texas. Called “the first map of Texas printed in the United States” and “the first meaningful map of Texas” (presumably there’s an earlier map of Coahuila y Tejas out there), only eight copies of the 1830 edition are known to survive. (Above is a scan of the Library of Congress’s copy.) The map will be on temporary display from today through May 4th and will be the centrepiece of a future exhibition. KBTX-TV, press release. [Tony Campbell]
Connecting Texas: 300 Years of Trails, Rails, and Roads, an exhibition of 300 years’ worth of maps and documents from the Texas General Land Office and several private map collectors, is on now at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and runs until 17 September 2018. More from the Texas General Land Office.
Some of the maps presented in this exhibit include Stephen F. Austin’s landmark 1830 map of Texas, unique plat maps that show Native American trails, one-of-a-kind manuscript military maps of the Republic and State of Texas, German immigration maps of the Texas Hill Country, hand-drawn railroad maps created to illustrate the progress of construction of railways across the state, cattle and trail maps from the 1880s, and interesting maps of Hemisfair ’68 in San Antonio, and much more.
Previously: And Now Some Map News from Texas.
Here’s a CBS News gallery of before-and-after images showing the impact of flooding in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The page is undated but was published on 1 September. [Dave Smith]
And, via CityLab, here are a set of maps from the Urban Institute that show the impact of Hurricane Harvey on Houston’s neighbourhoods, based on income levels, home ownership rates, accumulated-equity rates, all of which looking at the economic impact of the storm. “Harvey’s aftermath puts an enormous hurdle in front of all homeowners and renters but will be a particular setback for low-income, minority families recovering from the 2008 housing bust.”
Previously: Mapping Hurricane Harvey’s Impact.
The Washington Post maps rainfall and flooding levels in the Houston area.
The New York Times is collecting several maps on two web pages. The first page deals with subjects like rainfall, river level, current and historical hurricane tracks, damage reports, and cities and counties under evacuation orders. Maps on the second page look at Harvey’s impact on the Houston area.
Esri’s U.S. Flooding Public Information Map includes precipitation and flood warnings.
#Harvey in perspective. So much rain has fallen, we've had to update the color charts on our graphics in order to effectively map it. pic.twitter.com/Su7x2K1uuz
— National Weather Service (@NWS) August 28, 2017
Kenneth Field critiques the National Weather Service’s decision to add more colours to their precipitation maps (see above). “Simply adding colours to the end of an already poor colour scheme and then making the class representing the largest magnitude the very lightest colour is weak symbology. But then, they’ve already used all the colours of the rainbow so they’re out of options!”
NASA’s page on Hurricane Harvey has been updated many times, sometimes several times a day, since Harvey began its life as Tropical Depression 9 on 17 August. It includes plenty of satellite imagery of the storm, as well as temperature and rainfall maps.
California as an Island and Worlds That Never Were, an exhibition of maps from the Roy V. Boswell Collection for the History of Cartography at California State University at Fullerton. Runs from 22 January to 29 March at CSU Fullerton’s Pollak Library. News release. [WMS]
Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State features maps spanning more than 400 years of Texas history, mostly from the Texas General Land Office, as well as two museums and private collectors. Runs from 27 January to 8 October at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. News release. [WMS]
James Harkins of the Texas General Land Office shares his favourite map: the 1986 Natural Heritage of Texas map, which featured endangered and vulnerable Texas wildlife.
I was three years old when this map was released. When I was at Moore Elementary (home of the fighting Armadillos!) in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, I specifically remembered this map because it was huge! The Natural Heritage Map of Texas is 4-feet by 4-feet, and it hung in the school cafeteria, to the left of the stage where so many school assemblies had occurred. The map is colorful, big and filled with animals. To be honest, at the time, the animals are what drew my attention, but the map always stuck in my mind because it was the first large wall map I had ever seen. More than anything, though, there was an ocelot in my face, and in the face of every other elementary student in the building who walked up to look at this map. At the time, I thought an ocelot was kind of like a mix between a house cat and a lion or a tiger, and a lion or tiger was really cool. I was hooked! I would always look at the ocelot, as well as the other animals, and the map, and think about what it all meant.
Texas Monthly has a piece about Christopher Alan Smith, who for the past decade has been creating original maps, mostly of Texas and Texas-related subjects. It’s been his full-time gig since 2008. Smith uses a mixture of pen-and-ink and acrylic paints:
I tend to follow the style of postage stamps and currency. I use a pen-and-ink stipple technique, which is a series of dots that create the illusion of halftones. Cross-hatching is another method, using lines instead of dots. I’ve also started using engraved wood to give the maps a layered, 3-D look. For example, on my Thirteen Colonies map, I illustrated the coastline on two layers of hardboard.
[WMS]
Running from 29 April to 5 September 2016 at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas, Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State “is a once-in-a-generation, collaborative exhibition covering nearly three hundred years of Texas mapping. The maps, dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, document the birth of Texas, the evolution of the physical and political boundaries of the state and the rise of the Alamo and San Antonio Missions.” [WMS]
Meanwhile, the Texas General Land Office has acquired five rare maps from the 1840-1841 survey of the boundary between the then-Republic of Texas and the United States (see example above). Press release. [Tony Campbell/WMS]
A copy of an 1853 map of Texas by Jacob de Cordova found in a $10 box of ragtime sheet music sold at auction last weekend for $10,000. The map, once owned by surveyor James M. Manning, who died in 1872, was bought, along with a related letter, by Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi, whose library houses the Manning papers. [via]
