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.

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:
Representations of borders
Equal Earth Projection
Asamblea de Artistas Revolucionarios de Oaxaca (ASARO)
Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts
Kinngait Studios
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
Protest signage
Surveillance signage and graphics
Persuasive cartography and cartography as satire
Illustration and the periodical press
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
Alternative or conceptual mapping

Submissions must be emailed by June 5, 2020. Authors of the selected articles will be invited to present their work at a symposium hosted by the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM on October 30, 2020.

Please visit the 'External Link' below for the full call for papers and detailed instructions for formatting papers and submitting papers.