Heaven & Earth is Now Open

When you think of East Asian works of art and the color blue, your mind might jump to Hokusai and The Great Wave off Kanagawa. But it turns out that some of the earliest works from this part of the world to use the Prussian blue colorant were maps!

From May 11 to August 31, you can see some of these maps at the Leventhal Center in our special exhibition Heaven & Earth: The Blue Maps of China. This exhibition centers around two colossal maps created in China during the Qing Dynasty—and tells a global story of how they came to be made. The exhibition is guest curated by Dr. Richard Pegg, Director and Curator of the MacLean Collection in Chicago, IL. Admission is free.

Visit the gallery → 

Small Grants for Digital Publications - Applications Due May 20

The Leventhal Map & Education Center’s Small Grants Fund for Early Career Digital Publications is closing on May 20 for applications for the 2024-2025 academic year. The Small Grants program supports early career scholars through the process of producing a publication for general audiences in a digital format. The program is designed to catalyze creative projects which utilize a digital medium to present scholarly work through engaging, accessible, and experimental communicative modalities. Read about our 2023-2024 cohort of Small Grant awardees here.

Apply by May 20 → 

Within The Body & Beyond It

Supported by the Leventhal Center’s Small Grants for Early Career Digital Publications, essayist Ilana Bean explores the shared lineage between cartography and anatomy, and why that relationship still matters today.

For hundreds of years, distortion has informed how we view the world beyond us as well as the worlds inside us, too. “Cartographers and anatomists both create an unnatural image,” writes Bean, “in order to understand the real.” Comparing maps from the Leventhal Center with medical illustrations, Bean shows how the notorious Mercator projection has a lot more in common with representations of the human muscular system than you might expect. Depictions of the body use many of the same techniques—such as distortions in size and scale—as depictions of the earth, with implications for how we understand politics, medicine, and even life itself.

Read the full article → 

“Civic Data Literacy for Libraries”: Still Time to Apply!

The Leventhal Center has partnered with Civic Switchboard to host a 2-day workshop (June 27-28) at the Boston Public Library on understanding “civic data,” or data that describes community life and the decision-making and policies that affect people and places. Civic data can include not only data produced by governmental organizations, but also non-profits, civic institutions (like libraries!), and other community-based organizations.

Led by members of the Civic Switchboard team with support from LMEC staff, this workshop will bring together 20 library workers who use civic data or who are interested in developing new civic data roles and projects at their institutions. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the Institute is full. Please direct questions to LMEC’s Ian Spangler.

Apply here → 

A Great Time of Year to “Walk to the Sea”

As the weather warms, flowers bloom, and Boston approaches summer, we invite you to spend some time exploring the city using our free Walk to the Sea self-guided tour. Stretching one mile from Beacon Hill to Long Wharf, Walk to the Sea invites you into the history of a city whose destiny and fortunes have long been shaped by the relationship between land and water. Using the companion digital guide and following the monuments along the route, you can experience centuries of history condensed into just a few city blocks.

Take a Walk to the Sea →