Jerry's book(s)

On October 30 National Geographic released a new book, "All Over the Map," by Betsy Mason and Greg Miller. It explores mapping through the centuries and in different disciplines. The last section, entitled "Maps and the Imagination," includes four pages devoted to Jerry's Map. Take a look!

And, the first weekend of January, I will have a second meeting with Zach Angles to further the planning of a book about my work. The cost of putting this project together has been provided by a longtime friend of mine. I am very grateful for his help. If all goes well that book should appear in about two years.

What the verso shows

The back of each panel of Jerry's map tells us a lot about the history of that version of the panel. The one shown above, S4/E17, generation III, was copied from generation II on July 18, 2013. It was modified some time after that and was retired when it was copied on September 6, 2014. The copy became generation IV. Once Gen III was copied and archived it became eligible for exhibition. This sample panel has been shown five times after being retired and the museums where it has been shown are stamped on the back. 

Fresh numbers

This panel, N3/E34, is the latest added to Jerry's Map. It brings the total number of panels to
3567. That means that the total area of the Map is currently just over 1900 square feet. The population of The Map is now 17,590,540, and The Void counts 69,300 inhabitants. 

There are now 457 followers of Jerry's Map on Twitter and 2038 subscribers to the Subreddit, r/JerryMapping.

Jerry's Great Giveaway: Update

In the fall of 2016, following the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, I offered to donate 60 panels of my Map to the Prefectural Art Museum. They accepted. Then, in 2017, following a lecture on my work at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, I offered the curator a gift of 20 panels (like the ones above). She graciously accepted.

Since then I have been sending sets of 20 panels, unsolicited, to museums world-wide. Here are the results: four more museums have accepted the gift, and they include:
     Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Vermont
     Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
     Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
     Grand Rapids Art Museum

One museum, the Art Instute of Chicago, rejected the gift but failed to return the packet.

Several major museums have rejected and returned the gift. They are:
     Denver Art Museum
     Guggenheim Museum, New York
     Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
     Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
     Philadelphia Museum of Art
     Tate Modern, London
     Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
     Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Another museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, sent a letter saying that the gift had been referred to the appropriate curator. That was in October, 2017, and I have had no further word.

And the there are those museums which have been sent packets and from whom I have had no reply:
     CAM St. Louis
     Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
     MOCA Cleveland
     Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City
     Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem MA
     Pompidou Center, Paris
     Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal
     Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

No gift packets have been sent out since May of this year. In the future I will take the more conventional route of inquiring first to see if a museum is interested in the gift. I'll keep you posted!

Wouldn't it be wonderful......

.......if someone spliced all of the Jerry's Map scans together to create a giant animated film showing the growth and modification of the work? We have on file some 30,000 scans of individual Map panels. They show each  panel at each generation of its development. Morphing these scans together would create a stunning history of the Map.

So who is game to take this on? And who is getting out their wallet to underwrite the effort? Microsoft? Google? IBM? Wouldn't it look great in your ads?

Other ideas? Just let me know!

Thanks!

Map meets theater!

I had dinner in New York the other night with my friend, Terry, a talented theater director and storyteller. We agreed to try to collaborate on a project. I would supply settings, and he would add stories or even improvised scenes in which actors would create the story. I suggested to Terry that he follow me on Twitter and that I would supply settings and verbal triggers for him to pursue.

The panel above shows my first attempt at doing this. The inscription on the Map reads "Far Northern Steppe Settlement Camp." The notion is that this is remote camp in a place that re-animated humans from planet Earth are taken by higher beings to become acclimated to life in this new human zoo.

Whaddya think? Too creepy? If you buy the concept what would you call the human specimens? Earthlings? Earthers? Earthies? And what would we call the higher beings?

Help!

Off to the Folk Art museum again!

New museum donations

Since I last blogged about the museum donation project two more museums have accepted my offer of 20 original contiguous panels of the Map.

Pictured above is the group given to the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago. In addition, the Rose Museum at Brandeis recently accepted a similar gift.

I am continuing the donation process on a random basis with names drawn from a group of candidates. We welcome additions to our list of. So, if you know of a museum (or other public institution such as a hospital or library) that would appreciate owning a section of Jerry's Map, please let us know!

The generations

The images above, of panel S6/W11, show typical changes in Jerry's Map panels from one generation to the next. That area has gone from undeveloped rural land to a growing urban landscape, the city of Penfold. It now has been attacked by the Void.

Huge new Void, V.107!

Last Friday I drew the card above which instructed me to do 38 new 3" higher dimension squares. The panel receiving that treatment was N19/W13. The result is shown above. The additional Void areas covered parts of the contiguous panels. In all, 114 square inches of previously green agricultural terrain was covered. In addition, 27,125 inhabitants of the city of Nas Bartha, started in 2004, were sent to the new dimension.

Museum donation update

In the summer of 2016 I made a gift of Map panels to the Aichi Prefectural Art Museum in Nagoya, the host institution of the Aichi Triennial. It was out of gratitude for the invitation I had been given to participate in that massive show.

Last year, after the American Folk Art Museum chose me as one of the three artists featured in their annual "Uncommon Artists" lectures, I made a gift to them. That, coupled with the Nagoya gift, spurred me to make similar gifts to other museums throughout the world.

To accomplish my project I made a list of 52 museums and put their names in a jar. I drew names at random and proceeded to send each one a square block of 20 original Map panels like the one above.

To date 16 museums have been sent panels. Four have accepted the gift; five have rejected the offer; and the rest have yet to respond. Of the five rejections only two have returned the panels.

I now look on this project as part of the art making process itself. I have long claimed that my Map is part of the real world, not a framed object apart from it. So, finding an ultimate home for my work is a natural element in the life of the Map.

I welcome suggestions for museums which might welcome a gift from me.

Thank you!

Jerry at MIT

This coming Friday, February 9, I will be speaking at MIT at a symposium sponsored by the Storytelling Space Group. The talk is open to the public, and I'd be happy to see other "worldbuilders" there. Here's the link:

https://calendar.mit.edu/event/worlds_world-building#.WnXqnvmnG1s