DC Diary- The Map Art of Guillermo Kuitca

Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca, 49, took up much of our attention on the fourth day of our family excursion to Washington, DC, which was Thursday. His works, which include two striking paintings of airport baggage merry-go-rounds, are on display at the Smithsonian Hirshorn Museum of Art until Jan. 16.

I was most awe-struck by Kuitca's paintings of maps, one of which was for the entire state of North Dakota (the image is a standard map of the state). Like the baggage carousel, one would think such a subject might be way too mundane to make an elaborate painting out of, but Kuitca managed to pull it off by illustrating how arbitrary lines that divide states, counties and even international borders can be.

Kuitca did something similar with a grander map painting that made Fargo seem close to Chicago and Philadelphia seem close to Kansas City, which made one realize that our lives are indeed shaped by these lines and they can be rearranged without any logical sense of geography, especially in a world where we can now get emails from Karachi, Pakistan, as well as our friend who might live in the next town over from us in a place like Welch, W. Va.

According to Wikipedia, Kuitca has said that he believes our notions of place are always evolving.

As for North Dakota, which is quite far from Washington, DC, it is the 19th largest state in size, but it also has the third lowest population. North Dakota also has the highest density per capita of any state for churches, which makes it all the more amazing that Barack Obama almost captured the vote for the state against the McCain-Palin ticket (or should we say the Palin-McCain ticket).

There were 920 Muslims and 730 Jews in North Dakota according to the 2000 Census (as stated in Wikipedia) and assuredly those numbers might well have radically changed. Interestingly enough, there are many famous Jews from neighboring Minnesota, including Sen. Al Franken and Bob Dylan.

Perhaps, the famous person ever from North Dakota was the late band leader Lawrence Welk, born in the hamlet of Strasburg, N.Dak. His tv specials still air on PBS stations around the country.

SIDEBAR: A great tweet that we read tonight from The Kansan, who we presume is a progressive college student in Lawrence, Kan., was the following: "That doesn't make sense. Where does the bible say you're free to let your neighbor die so the super rich profit?"