These fantastical maps explore the psychic blueprint of iconic artists

By Brian Braiker

Remember going places?

Unable to travel, stuck at home and pandemic-perplexed, Brendan Lorber spent 2020 taking trips of a different kind (not THAT kind): He started putting a new spin on an old art form. Maps.

Equally inspired by “Lord of the Rings,” Dungeons & Dragons, and Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” Lorber began hand drawing fantastical atlases to impossible destinations. He created maps of people. These are psychic, slightly psychedelic, maps that express the careers and legacies of iconic figures including David Bowie, Gertrude Stein, Prince, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe.

They’re compelling, lovely and weird creations. The Museum of Modern Art thinks so too; in September they acquired his map of poet Frank O’Hara for their collection.

Each map is hand-drawn in pen and ink, and then letter-pressed in a small edition on 9” x 11.5” archival paper. The maps invite you the viewer into fantastical topographies, each labeled with various attributes from one of the trailblazing writer or musician he’s highlighting.

The works, created in Lorber’s home across from Green-Wood Cemetery, call back to ancient master mapmakers like Al Idrisi, Fra Mauro, and Gerardus Mercator. In addition to MoMA, Lober’s maps have found homes at The Free Black Women’s Library, Opus 40 Gallery, Artists Space, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Woodland Pattern Center, and private collections.

Here’s a selection of Lorber’s maps, with captions by Lorber himself. You can follow him on Instagram here.

Frank O’Hara was a New York School poet, an art critic, and a pioneer of secret significances in a throwaway line. He was a great fan of wandering off, especially at lunchtime, using a quick step away from them all to locate the crucial bonds that draw us ever closer.

David Bowie was a singer-songwriter, less a cultural icon than the progenitor of his own iconic culture. Protean and ever curious, he traveled not to new places but *as* new places.

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. A poet and teacher she impelled her readers forward despite all difficulties, writing, “Art hurts. Art urges voyages – / and it is easier to stay at home.”

Gertrude Stein was a poet, novelist, playwright and collector of both art and artists. Arguing with Pablo Picasso about artistic exploration she (may have) grabbed him by the collar and pronounced “you are extraordinary within your limits but your limits are extraordinarily there.”

John Ashbery will take you places you’ve been before but never known. He’ll take you by the hand like a tablet to the mountaintop or a case of Chablis to the counter to pay, taking his time and also taking your breath away.

Prince can take you around the world in a day, or make the world go around you. Together we can go astray, go crazy, go far, go to bed, or know where to go when the lights go down.

Emily Dickinson supposedly said, “To travel far, there is no better ship than a book,” but I don’t really think she did. Nevertheless each short verse of hers is a world unto itself, simultaneously hurtling and perfectly still.

Edgar Allan Poe roved half-raving between a jilted past and a longed-for future, abandoning tonight’s darkness for something even darker. The unsettled dominions he discovered remain chillingly useful for our own shadowy explorations.