This was a museum exhibition curated by the Exhibition Advisory Committee of the Northern Illinois University Art Museum and exhibition guest curator, NIU Philosophy of Art Education Professor Richard Siegesmund. There was also a catalog of the exhibition with an essay by Professor Siegesmund.
Exerpt from Richrd Siegesmund, Ph.D.'s essay, Data as Objects of Exhibition: "Picking up on Tufte's theme of data visualization beginning political dialogue, Anne J. Lindberg's ghostly maps trace the destruction of the natural habitat of the longleaf pine ecosystem in the Southeastern United States. Her work Paper Forest consists of 32 individually framed 10" x 10" drawings. Each image maps the location of remaining longleaf pine forests and their integration into Appalachian ecology. Examples of secondary information included are migratory paths or places of animal refuge. GIS Drawing I utilizes Arc GIS, a mapping and analytics platform used by ecologists, to report specific regions of biodiversity related to the longleaf pine."
In the Pines: Exhibition Concept The work for this exhibition was inspired by my experience of coming to a new place, the Southeastern United States, and trying to get a sense of it. I focused on the longleaf pine ecosystem, a rich forest type that once dominated the southeast, from Virginia to Texas. In about 150 years, this vast forest was decimated and fragmented through various industries mismanagement and exploitation. There are efforts to grow and protect the fragments of forest that still exist. In this exhibition, I represented the forest—or the idea of the forest—through a mixture of representational imagery and imagery that represents information: species distribution maps, maps of turpentine distilleries at the turn of the century, hexagonal grid mapping techniques, etc. The title of the exhibition, In the Pines, refers to the title of a traditional Southern Appalachian folk song from the 1870’s.
