Digital and printed map graphics underpin current discourse among news outlets concerning ecological resources, indigenous land rights, immigration, and urban planning. Maps, as normally understood today, diagram the relative spatial relationships of locations, people, and material resources. Such informational graphics provide spatial data and inscribe the identifying features of the represented communities and ideologies of the cartographer into print and pixels. Graphics thereby reinforce the factual nature of the audio, visual or typographic narratives surrounding the map.

Interacting with maps requires the viewer to either accept the data as a transparent representation of spatial experience or to confront the multivalent relationships between the people in regions being mapped, the maker of the maps, and the users and interpreters of maps. In the past three decades, scholars have worked to understand how human cognition functions in tandem with informational graphics to produce rather than only represent knowledge. Design theorists such as Johanna Drucker and Sandra Rendgren have focused on the relationship between functions of contemporary mapping and European graphic models like emblem books. Similarly, recent exhibitions at Stanford University, the Library of Congress, and Blanton Museum of Art emphasize the way maps work to support and/or subvert colonial and capitalist objectives, and Ruth Pelzer-Montada has proposed to create a map or topography of printmaking in Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking: Critical Writing since 1986 (2018). Current interests in the graphic arts suggest an interest in increasing transparency between the production and consumption of graphics and envisioning graphic models and criticism of graphics in a network.

Scholarship on cartography in the Americas has largely isolated maps, atlases, and travel ephemera from the historiography of printmaking and the graphic arts. Synchronously, various environmental protests widely reported in recent years highlight the relationships between place and the work of indigenous artists. The 60th Anniversaries of Kinngait Studios at the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative and the Tamarind Institute, along with a forthcoming exhibit at the University of New Mexico’s Art Museum particularly highlight the crucial roles of Native American and First Nations printmakers in the commercial and critical prominence of print media. Acknowledging these developments and seeking to contribute to ongoing discourse regarding the production, circulation, and criticism of the graphic arts, the thirteenth volume of Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas will center on the theme, “Cartographic Infrastructures: Mapping and the Graphic Arts from 1500 to the Present.” The editorial committee seeks essays from graduate students presenting interdisciplinary research that considers the ways in which the spectrum of media—i.e. graphic arts, graphic design, infographics, pictographs, and/or works on paper—thematically, conceptually, and formally intersect across historical eras and political, ideological, and geological boundaries. Our aim in doing so is to provide broader esthetic and critical contexts to understand applications of maps and infographics in social and political discourse. 


Topics for essays include, but are not limited to:
• Topics for essays include, but are not limited to:
• Representations of borders
• Equal Earth Projection
• Asamblea de Artistas Revolucionarios de Oaxaca (ASARO)
• Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts
• Kinngait Studios
• Printmaking at the Tamarind Institute and reviews of exhibits or events
affiliated with the 60th Anniversary
• Exhibitions-To-Go from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics
• Historiography of cartography in the Americas
• Protest signage
• Surveillance signage and graphics
• Persuasive cartography and cartography as satire
• Illustration and the periodical press
• Hazard mapping
• Landscape iconography
• Indigenous epistemologies
• Engagement of contemporary print workshops with urban planning
and cityscapes
• Global Information Systems (GIS) and gentrification
• Graphical User Interface
• Immersive print installation
• Urban, suburban, and rural infrastructures
• Advertising, packaging and trade ephemera

Completed essays, reviews of recent publications or exhibitions, and interviews are requested from M.A. or Ph.D. students currently enrolled in graduate programs. We accept submissions written in English or Spanish.

Each submission must be accompanied by a cover letter that prominently notes the title of the essay, the field of study to which it pertains, as well as a curriculum vitae that indicates the author’s status (e.g. M.A./Ph.D. student or Ph.D. candidate), department, and institution name and location.

Essay writers selected to publish in Hemisphere will be invited to participate in a symposium at the University of New Mexico in the fall semester of 2020, where they will present their essay.

Submit questions or essays to hmsphrunm.edu.
Guidelines for formatting submissions are available at art.unm.edu/hemisphere .
The Deadline for Submissions is March 8, 2020.