On a KLM airline map headed for the Tremaine Art Gallery, passengers ride on top of an airplane alongside a wood stove. Nearby, a child prepares to launch a toy plane. Whatever the airline intended to communicate about its routes, the illustrator clearly had additional matters to address. Apparently, cabin baggage restrictions were still a work in progress.
Such geographical extracurriculars abound in “Armchair Traveler: The Pictorial Maps of Michael R. Stone ’80,” opening November 3 at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. Curated by Joan Baldwin, the exhibition gathers illustrated maps whose makers approached the world with a combination of artistic ambition, comic license, and an apparently bottomless appetite for detail.
“These people were really obsessed with how much detail they could cram into a particular space,” says Baldwin, the school’s curator of special collections. Look closely and the landscape starts misbehaving: a matador flees a bull; people hitch rides on aircraft; regional self-regard assumes continental proportions. A map called Texas Brags offers approximately the level of Lone Star modesty its title promises.
Stone, a 1980 Hotchkiss graduate, began collecting in the mid-1980s. His California-based collection now encompasses more than 500 maps, spanning centuries. For Tremaine, Baldwin wanted the pictorial material: colorful, funny, and suitable for a gallery without the environmental controls required by much older rarities. She recalls asking for “the sort of junior varsity, not the varsity.” Judging from the airborne stove, the junior varsity has excellent prospects.
The exhibition concentrates on the early and middle decades of the 20th century, when pictorial maps enjoyed a surge of popularity. Their makers used geography as a framework for jokes, local lore, architectural portraits, and advertising. Accuracy had company. A place’s reputation, its residents’ enthusiasms, and the illustrator’s own preoccupations could all claim acreage.
The tradition’s comic possibilities were well established by MacDonald Gill’s 1914 Wonderground Map of London Town. At its London Zoo, William Blake’s tiger shares the illustrated menagerie with a giraffe and a joke about being “fed up.” Geography could accommodate poetry and a dad joke within the same enclosure. Gill is among the artists represented at Tremaine, alongside Jo Mora and Ernest Dudley Chase.
Chase came to maps through greeting-card design, bringing that trade’s wit into elaborate compositions packed with landmarks and miniature scenes. Harvard’s map collection preserves more than 50 of his own map copies, along with work by other artists he collected. The compulsion to picture the world could evidently develop a second compulsion: acquiring other people’s attempts.
Baldwin notes that the field also offered opportunities to women seeking careers as commercial artists. One of the exhibition’s most intriguing examples emerges from a different profession entirely. Dorothea Dix Lawrence, an opera singer turned folklorist, translated her fascination with American song into a Folklore Music Map of the United States, published in 1946. Developed from her radio program, it combines illustrations, musical classifications, and a bibliography. Imagine a record collection unfolding into a country.
“Everything she learned, she spilled out onto this map,” Baldwin says. She describes some works as approaching mind maps: a subject enthusiast’s accumulated knowledge concentrated in a single illustration.
That impulse reaches a wonderfully extravagant expression in Financial Irrigation of the United States, which diagrams New Deal funding as a watery landscape. Baldwin describes an enormous waterfall feeding channels toward federal agencies, with a key explaining their acronyms and allocations. Government spending becomes hydraulic spectacle. Here is an answer for anyone who has ever wished fiscal policy involved more waterfalls.
Elsewhere, maps show how California and Boston regard the rest of the country. Their distortions turn civic pride into a visual confession: every place suspects it occupies the center of things.
Baldwin’s prescription is slow looking. These works reward the visitor willing to linger over the margins, decipher a caption, or follow an illustrator down a highly specific rabbit hole. For those inspired to contribute, an 11-foot world map will invite visitors to mark personally meaningful places with notes, photographs, poems, or collages. Having spent time inside other people’s geographical obsessions, you can stake out a little territory for your own.
“Armchair Traveler” runs November 3, 2026–January 24, 2027, at Tremaine Art Gallery, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, Connecticut. Admission is free. Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–4pm; Sunday, noon–4pm. Closed November 21–30 and December 17–January 4.
