The editorial committee for Hemisphere: Visual Culture of the Americas seeks essays from graduate students for the 2020 issue. Volume 13 will consider the theme “Cartographic Infrastructures: Mapping and the Graphic Arts from 1500 to the Present”.
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 scholarly essays 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.