Mappers, Mapmakers, and Cartographers and Where to Find Them in Contemporary Art (a Modest Proposal)

The so-called ‘art map age’, a phenomenon marked by the convergence of visual arts and cartography, emerged from the 1960s–70s to the early 2000s. The close relationship between cartographic and artistic language is a commonplace of the contemporary world: while artistic experiments with maps have been supported by extensive literature, in this paper I follow a strictly geographical approach to describe some trends in contemporary art. I take inspiration from a terminological distinction introduced by Arthur Robinson and Barbara Petchenik, namely the distinction between ‘mapper’, ‘mapmaker’, and ‘cartographer’. Furthermore, by combining these three types with different attitudes toward maps (as medium, image, abstraction, etc.), I propose a concise classification scheme.