We’re excited to introduce Sam Walker to the LMEC community as our Visitor Service and Exhibition Assistant! Sam joined us this July as a Northeastern Co-op student and is currently a Pre-Law student studying History, Culture, and Law and minoring in Art History. We sat down with Sam to learn more about her interests, upcoming work at the Center, and her favorite map in the collection.

Sam, we’re so excited to have you on board here at the Leventhal Map & Education Center. Tell us a little bit about your background—what led you to your new role with us?

I’m currently entering my fourth year at Northeastern as a Pre-Law student studying History, Culture, and Law and minoring in Art History. I am currently the President of Northeastern’s Taekwondo Team and was formerly the Public Relations and Outreach Chair, so I really love working with people and sharing things I’m passionate about with others. I am super interested in history and the changes that humanity has gone through and how we have shaped the things around us over time, and love to see that communicated visually through art and design. From my perspective, maps are all pieces of art in their own right, with some added practical benefit, so the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s work aligns with my interests and areas of study!

I’ve worked as a martial arts instructor for the last eight years and have also had the opportunity to work as a teacher with elementary school students during the pandemic, so education is something I have been doing for years and love. I’ve actually wanted to work in a museum or education center ever since I was a kid, so getting to have that experience in a place focused on history that uses the Center’s expansive collection really drew me in!

As a Northeastern co-op student, you’ll be with us for the next six months. What things are you most looking forward to during this time at the Leventhal Center?

I am excited to be able to play a role in setting up a gallery exhibition, as well as working on research for adding context to upcoming exhibits! I’m a museum fiend and I’m looking forward to learning what it’s like behind the scenes when putting together such immersive experiences for visitors. I enjoy research and learning new things which makes learning about different maps we have in the collections really neat. Heaven & Earth, the current exhibition that is on display right now, piqued my interest as soon as I heard about it, so I’m eager to get to know that exhibition well and share it with other people. I also love talking to and meeting new people, so I am genuinely super excited to be able to interact with everyone that comes into the gallery and help guide their experience with the awesome material we have to share!

How do you see this co-op informing or influencing your idea of life post-college and future career?

I’ve always wanted to work at a museum or educational center, so I definitely think this experience will lead to me pursuing more work within those fields. I am really interested in law school moving forward and pursuing a legal career, and have been bouncing around with the idea of art or history in the law, so I think this co-op will definitely be able to guide me with finding a way to connect my interests. I’m hoping to be able to continue working at museums moving forward, and ideally doing legal work for them in the future.

You’re starting in the middle of Heaven & Earth: The Blue Maps of China. In your opinion, what’s the most interesting bit of information you’ve discovered in the exhibition so far?

This exhibition is visually stunning and historically interesting, so I’m psyched to be here while it’s on display. My personal favorite piece of information from this exhibition is about the coloration of the maps and how they came to be printed in this way. Prussian blue is an iconic and a massively famous pigment in the art world, but its use was limited to Europe until the late eighteenth century due to the limited and complex knowledge of the chemical compounds required to make it. The creation of these maps marked one of the first times the pigment was utilized on such a large scale for printing in Asia, and even predated the most famous use of Prussian blue in Asian artwork, Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

The design of the maps themselves are stunning, but the distinctive blue coloration definitely sets them apart from the other pieces in the exhibition. I think it’s so neat to understand how that came to be and what something as simple as a color can tell us about the historical relations between these major world powers at the time the maps were produced.

What is your earliest memory of maps?

I traveled a lot with my parents growing up, and whenever we would be in a new city or country, they would always hand me a map of the area we were in and have me navigate. This was something I viewed as a little bit of a stressful event as a kid, when I was young and wholly unfamiliar with the places we went. GPS also existed at the time, so I also never understood the need for me to navigate using a physical map. As I’ve gotten older, I now appreciate that my parents had me do this, as I really got to know the places we visited better and I still remember the areas we traveled around.

Unfortunately, my sense of direction and navigational skill have remained largely the same as when I was a child (that is to say, poor), but I am now in the habit of picking up a map whenever I go somewhere new to try and orient myself to my surroundings. I find that looking at a map of any place you travel really helps cement in your mind where you are, what’s around you, and how that place fits into the greater surrounding area. While GPS is helpful for just getting somewhere quickly, I personally find that if I want to understand a place better and connect with it more, I need to look at a map.

Do you have a favorite map that you’ve found in the collections in your initial browsing of our holdings?

My favorite map that I’ve stumbled across while looking through the collections has been this 1940 map, Art Forms of the Pacific Area by Miguel Covarrubias. I think it’s pretty unique in that it’s implicitly communicating culture alongside geography. Whenever I go to art museums, I love when pieces are grouped by subject matter and show a range of countries that have produced visually similar pieces. I’m intrigued by the artistic and stylistic differences shown by region, and the ways art can help visually discern the things valued by different cultures. This map is super interesting to me because it allows one to visualize recurring motifs and compare them across different cultures to see how they change by region.

The art style of the map itself is beautiful; it’s extremely colorful and whimsical, and the cartoonish figures make it very easy to visually digest and unpack. The artist and cartographer behind the piece, Miguel Covarrubias, was well known for his caricatures and illustrations, and I think the way in which he used his usual style to create a map created a really stunning piece of art. This map is actually part of a series of six, where Covarrubias also created other maps detailing peoples, flora and fauna, the economy, native dwellings, and native transportation—all of the Pacific region. I love how many different cultures the artist was able to represent here, and feel like it gives anyone looking at it a more humanized understanding of the different places the map shows.