Panel Discussion: Beyond Boundaries - Mapmaking

This event is organized by The Drawing Foundation in partnership with the Conservation Center at NYU IFA as part of On Drawings 2025.

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Beyond Boundaries: Mapmaking
Panel Discussion

Even in the age of satellite images, GPS, and Google Maps, mapping remains a drawn act—raising questions of orientation, imagination, and belonging. This program explores maps – their making, their functions, and their repurposing – focusing on mapmaking as a hand-drawn delineation of place and boundaries, and how artists and scholars expand on mapmaking traditions to suggest new ways of seeing and placing ourselves. From early hand-drawn maps to the tools and techniques that render mapmaking possible, from the juxtaposition of distinct histories of movement to the creation of new worlds, this panel brings together speakers with vastly different perspectives to reflect on the history of drawing maps and consider how mapping—past and present—shapes our understanding of place and invites us to draw it anew.

Speaker Bios:

Emily Bowe is the Assistant Director of the Leventhal Map & Education Center, where she oversees the Center’s public outreach and operations. Recently, she served as co-curator of the Center’s 2024-25 exhibition Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew our World, which explored the early history of computer cartography in Massachusetts. She brings a background as a designer, cartographer, and researcher with interests in maps, urban infrastructure, and community data practices to her work. Her academic training was at the Parsons School of Design at The New School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar.

Josh Dorman is an artist who recontextualizes antique images–including published maps, engravings, and diagrams–within fantastical drawn and painted worlds. Dorman’s work explores mythical landscapes, notions of collapsed time, and ideas of altered boundaries and states through multi-layered imagery. He probes unfamiliar, obsolete, and cryptic systems. Born in 1966 in Baltimore, Dorman graduated from Skidmore College in 1988 and received his MFA from Queens College in 1992. He lives and works in New York City, where he teaches drawing at The Spence School. His work is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery in New York and Billis Williams in Los Angeles, and is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, MA; Butler Institute of American Art, OH; International Collage Center, PA; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NY; Memory Bridge Foundation, IL; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Naples Museum, FL; Springfield Art Museum, MO; Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, NY.

Noah Goldrach is a specialist in the Books and Manuscripts department at Sotheby's, New York. With over a decade of experience cataloging and researching rare and antiquarian books, he has dealt extensively with both printed and manuscript maps. He was previously an appraiser in the Rare Books department at Doyle Auctions, and before that worked for Daniel Crouch Rare Books, one of the world’s leading specialist dealers in antiquarian maps and atlases. Throughout his career, Noah has worked with many significant hand-drawn maps, ranging from the archive of a New York City surveyor's firm, comprising hundreds of 18th- and 19th-century maps and plans, to an important 1531 portolan chart of the world by Vesconte Maggiolo.

T.K. McClintock is the founding Director of Studio TKM and remains Consulting Conservator to Studio TKM Associates, a facility for the conservation of fine art and historic works on paper that serves institutions, government and non-profit agencies and private individuals in North America, Europe and Asia. He has lectured and published on several areas of focus including cartographic and architectural records, historic wallcoverings, and the intersection of Asian and Western conservation practice. He was trained at the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Conservation and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the International Institute for Conservation, and the American Academy in Rome.

Organized & moderated by Lisa Conte, Assistant Professor of Paper Conservation and Co-Chair, Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, & Daniella Berman, Ph.D., Director of Programs and Partnerships, The Drawing Foundation

Image: Detail of Urbano Monte’s Manuscript Wall Map of the World (Composite map of Tavola 1-60), 1587, 40 x 51 cm. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, 10130.087