The U.S., Drawn from Memory

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

This canvas by artist Kim Dingle doesn’t look like a map, more like a herd of cows. But actually it’s a collection of maps. The artist asked teen-aged school kids in Las Vegas to draw their country in the shape they thought it had.

Florida is represented in some way on more or less every map, the protrusions of Texas and New England are less common. Probably because Florida’s is a physical limit to the US, while the borders of Texas and New England are political (and don’t show up on a satellite map, for instance).

The indentation in the US’s northern border made by the Great Lakes is missing in almost all drawings.

So are Alaska and Hawaii – but maybe the kids were only asked to draw the 48 contiguous states.

Many do manage to get Texas‘s southern protrusion, but some also add an extension in the west, which in all probability is the peninsula of Baja California – Mexican and therefore non-US, but unmissable on any map as it’s a huge geographic feature.

A few manage to get the bulging of the US West Coast, but many draw a straight line there; in fact, a lot of these drawings resemble not much more than box-shapes.

Strange Maps #61

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people