Talking Points: Paula Scher
How can we communicate data through visual art?
Paula Scher creates large-scale maps of regions around the world, representing numbers and statistics through emotion rather than straightforward facts. Using hand-painted typography, she distorts and simplifies complex data such as population, distance, and voting patterns in the places she maps.
Read the text below and watch the following video before beginning a discussion about Paula Scher’s work.
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Paula Scher
Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design.
Paula creates branding, but she also created a series of “maps” which contain “errors and mistakes”. Explore in the video and link below.
“Paula Scher painted two 9-by-12-foot maps that resembled patchwork quilts from afar, but contain much textual detail. She created lines that represented the separation of political allies or borders dividing enemies. Scher created the maps into layers that reference what we think when we think of Japan, Kenya, or the Upper East Side.
For instance, The United States (1999) was painted in blocky white print and full with a list of facts that we comprehend when we think about cities. Africa (2003) is represented in a stark black and white palette, hinting at a tortured colonial past. The land of the red rising sun is represented when we think of Japan (2004).
Scher decided to produce silk-screened prints of The World that contained large-scale images of cities, states, and continents blanketed with place names and other information. It is full of mistakes, misspellings, and visual allusions to stereotypes of places such as South America, painted with hot colours and has two ovaries on the sides. It was not created to be a reliable map but convey a sense of the places that are mediated and mangled.” Wiki
www.pentagram.com/news/paula-scher-maps
Abstract: Art of the Design/ Paula Scher
Please Note: At timecode 8.00 Paula Scher talks about her maps.
Questions to Ask Children:
How would you describe one of Paula’s maps to someone who couldn’t see them?
In what ways do Paula’s maps differ from regular maps?
How would these maps change if you held them in your hand?
This Talking Points Is Used In...
using sketchbooks to make visual notes
Show me what you see
