This program will be held in-person at the Newberry. Please register below.
In conjunction with the exhibition, "Mapping Outside the Lines," this discussion and hands-on workshop invites you to try your own hand at turning everyday paper maps into your own piece of art. To start the program, Sandy Rodriguez will discuss how she approaches her art with and through maps, in conversation with David Weimer, the Robert A. Holland Curator of Maps. In her Codex Rodríguez–Mondragón and other paintings, Rodriquez has manipulated and refashioned historical maps of the US-Mexico border to "interrogate legacies of colonial aggression in our daily lives." After their discussion, with Sandy's guidance, everyone will have a chance to make art with and on maps. Bring your creativity and be ready to explore how artists can transform maps to tell new stories about our world!
This event is part of programming connected with our free exhibition, Mapping Outside the Lines, running October 9, 2025, through February 14, 2026. The Mapping Outside the Lines programming is generously supported by the Chicago Free For All Fund at The Chicago Community Trust.
Speaker
Sandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist and researcher, and first-generation Chicana raised on the US-Mexico border. Her Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is made up of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. She has exhibited her works at the Denver Art Museum, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, South Korea. She was awarded the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award, and Migrations Initiative from Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell.
David Weimer is Newberry Curator of Maps and Director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. He has devoted his professional and scholarly work to guiding people into the history of maps and highlighting their interdisciplinary potential. In 2020, he co-curated an exhibition on the tactile reading of texts that earned him the Biennial Disability History Association’s Public Disability History Award.
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required.
Registration opens October 1.
Register NowInterested in learning more?
Take a look at related Adult Education courses:
How Maps Work - taught by David Weimer, curator of the exhibition "Mapping Outside the Lines"
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