Connections/Maps

I'm Melanie Holcomb and I'm a curator of Medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum.

I live in Brooklyn and I take the subway to work every day.

I love the New York subway.

I am fanatic about it. It's complex. It's intricate. If one line doesn't work another one will. And I am

astounded by how much of that information is conveyed in the subway map, which is just an extraordinary piece of communication.

What's great about the subway map is that it's not only about spatial distances, about

relative relationships between one stop to another. It also conveys time.

And this gets me back to the Met,

like this celestial globe that charts time and space, not just the position of the stars, but their movement over the year as well.

Look at this one from the Marshall Islands. It was made by a navigator, not so much as a map in the western sense of the word, but as an aid to remembering the swells and currents of the ocean.

I wonder why it is that we love maps so much.

I think in part it has to do with the fact that it allows us to be

God for a minute. It allows us to understand

the underlying order of a vast geographical space

or a complex system of things we cannot

even see; the heavens or

the body, like this map of the inside of the head,

or maybe just places that are faraway, and it allows us to grasp it all

in a single glance. But it also allows us to entertain the possibility of a journey

of imagining how were going to get from one place to another and what those various routes are.

You know with this Vermeer painting, I use to always look at the woman and think about the room that she's in, but now

I also see the map and I think of all the places it takes me to.

Is it about grasping the world at a single glance? Or is it about

setting off on a journey? Hmm, it's a little of both, I think, that makes maps or looking at maps such a

pleasurable experience.