In "indelible traces", Tiffany Chung paints and stitches maps that include personal and collective histories and experiences. How might you draw on a map, provided, to create an artwork that speaks to your experiences?

Use the maps provided to create a drawing that communicates your experience of place. Flip through the atlases and tear out one that includes a place you have a connection to. Using the chalk markers provided, fill the map in with your personal, lived experience. 

This map represents a geographical survey of a place. What elements from your life are missing from the map? What experiences have you had here? What routes do you travel? What feelings have you felt? Create your own map “key” for what you want to add to the map. Assign each element a symbol; Chung uses shapes like triangles, circles, and lines in a variety of colors. Use these symbols to fill the map with the textures of your life.

Like much of the artwork on view in "Tiffany Chung: indelible traces", this activity engages with critical cartography and counter-mapping.

Definitions: 

Critical cartography is a mapping and spatial-visualization practice that begins from the understanding that maps are not neutral; maps express relations of power, and critical cartography seeks to critique, contest, or subvert that power while creating other ways of knowing and seeing the world. Critical cartography asks us to read maps critically: Who made this map? For whom? What does it make visible? What does it leave out? And whose understanding of a place does it authorize?

Counter-mapping is a practice of making maps that challenge an established or dominant representation of territory. Counter-mapping uses the language and tools of maps to tell a different spatial story, often making visible people, histories, relationships, or claims that dominant maps have erased or marginalized.

Image credit: Detail: Tiffany Chung, ISW: areas of control; UNHCR: numbers and locations of Syrian refugees and IDPs as of April 2019, 2019. Acrylic, ink, and oil on vellum and paper, 76 x 93 cm (30 ¼ x 39 ½ in.). Photograph by Nash Baker. © Tiffany Chung

Drop-in, Self-Guided Art Activity

Throughout the year, WAM presents self-guided art-making activities inspired by an art piece, exhibition, or artist from the museum's collection. Everything you need to make your own masterpiece is provided and the activity is designed to be accessible and open to all. Drop-in during open hours and get creative! 

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Additional general operating support is generously provided by Ameriprise Financial.