While it was Nancy Graves’ camels that really put her on the map, it was her maps like I Part of Sabine D Region that secured her a place in my heart. 

Graves’ father was an accountant at the Berkshire Museum of Art. She grew up going to shows there, and many people attribute her childhood experience as to why she fell in love with the natural and the scientific, which she began to masterfully incorporate into her work from a young age. 

In the early 1970s, she began to make colorful topographical maps modeled after Polynesian and Inuit navigational maps. Then, when NASA began to release bathymetric measurements, electronic video transmissions, and computer analyses based on satellites, Graves’ work took a turn for the epic. While NASA received the critique that the images, videos, and maps they were releasing seemed more or less arbitrary (taste-based decisions, not scientific), Graves latched onto them and brought them to life through her series of mappings, paintings, and videos devoted to Earth, the moon, and Mars. She directly and accurately portrayed the scientific and technical aspects of these topographical, satellitic, and bathymetric pictures and videos, while at the same time depicting them on lithograph paper full of color and originality.

At times, Graves even became a kind of source of knowledge. When the first Mars photos were just being released to the public in 1973, she put out a twenty-four foot, four-panel painting of the surface of Mars. Considering the timeliness, size, and accuracy of the piece, it likely became a first touch point for many people, their first experience seeing an accurate representation of the surface of Mars.

In this piece specifically, she’s depicting a portion of the moon.