" You CAN Get There From Here "

Amy Albright (2005)
(colored paper, pen)

This exhibit contains 54 maps collected, curated, and/or created by Wisconsin artist Larry Stark. Larry started saving maps in the 1970s, intending to use them someday in a book or an exhibit. He has since asked people to either create maps for the project or loan maps that already exist. Some of the maps in the current show were made for the purpose of directing someone from one place to another while others were made as Art. Some fall in both categories.

Larry Stark has been an artist since 1967. In 1969 he began to travel the country selling art, arranging exhibits, and finding inspiration for his own art in the highway and its monuments. His work has been purchased by seventy public institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Institution, The National Gallery of Canada, The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and The Detroit Institute of Art. He has had one person exhibitions at over fifty public institutions including The Chicago Art Institute. He’s shown at many commercial art galleries including the Castelli Gallery in New York and the Morgan Gallery in Kansas City. His past work involved taking photographs and silk-screening them as limited edition prints on paper or as unique images on canvas. He now makes photographic ink jet prints. He also does “weird projects” and calls them art, which he relates to conceptual art, a movement founded by artists who believed that the concept behind a work of art is more important than the artist's product.

Additional information on Larry Stark and several images from his numerous projects can be found at larrystark.com.