Cartography

Artist Matt Cusick Maps Out The Living History Of America’s Highways.

- Eric Weiner

RUMMAGE THROUGH YOUR car’s glove box, ignoring the piles of old receipts, the owner’s manual, and maybe a long forgotten Nirvana CD, and you’ll notice there’s something missing. Something that, seemingly overnight, vanished into history. With the swift development of in-car navigation and then Google in the palm of your hand, physical maps have faded into obsolescence. Artist Matthew Cusick, 47, is instead finding new avenues for exploration in their faded pages.

Born in New York City and now living in Dallas, Texas, Cusick’s fascination with history manifests itself in dizzying collages of old cars and somehow-beautiful vistas of highway networks. Each one made up of numerous map scraps, sometimes of the same location from various points in time, Cusick’s creations are like looking back at the ebbs and flows of the American road all in one gulp.