The Detroit Atlas Collaboration is a printmaking, mapmaking, and bookbinding project in Detroit. My name is Lyz Luidens, printmaker, teacher, and map enthusiast, and I am organizing this project. It began with a yearlong artist residency working with a class of high schoolers at Detroit Community High School, and has continued into workshops in my own studio and farmers markets around Detroit and research into historical maps of the city!
This project is one part workshops, one part research. I will be facilitating free and donation based printmaking and bookbinding workshops around the city of Detroit (funded by this campaign and the matching Knight Arts Grant!). These workshops consist of teaching people a basic printmaking technique (relief, monoprinting, drypoint, screenprinting, etc) with a prompt to make a map of their Detroit, based on memory and personal experience. They print several personal, memory and experience based mapsFor the research portion of the project, I’ll be collaborating with librarians, information designers, and researchers to collect and create historical and data based maps of Detroit, which will be converted into printable blocks and screens to be used in those workshops.
The Detroit Atlas Collaboration is funded by a Knight Arts Challenge Match Grant, but in order to receive that funding, matching funds must be raised! You can read more about the project or donate at the crowdfunding page: www.patronicity.com/detroitatlas.
In the end, the personal maps and the data based maps will be hand bound together into Atlases of Detroit. Binding together the subjective maps and the objective maps will allow them to interact with each other within the book, to provide context for one another. My hope is that this context will imply to the reader that personal maps, and how spaces are physically experienced by people holds as much authority over describing and documenting that geographic space as data and historical geographies.
This project is most importantly a collaboration. The value comes from the variety of perspectives, the workshop attendees, the hosts, the researchers, the volunteers, and all the collaborators. Everyone who contributes to this project will be listed as a collaborator on the project website and in any exhibitions of the final work. The completed Atlases will seek homes in public spaces like libraries, schools, or community centers, where they will remain accessible to the public, free of charge.
Upcoming Workshops:
DETROITography 