Jerry Gretzinger
(b. 1942)
Place bornGrand Rapids, Michigan, United States
BiographyJerry Gretzinger began Jerry’s Map in 1963, with a doodle, and then evolved it into an adventure that would last at least one lifetime, from the first city, Wybourne, into the countryside beyond, then into other cities, nations, continents, and now, fifty-four years later, into other dimensions. It grew from a single eight by ten inch panel to several thousand panels tiled together—enough to cover a basketball court. It grows in concentric rings, with the oldest panels in the center, and the youngest at the edge, from tidy street plans drawn with a black pen on white card stock at its heart to the baroque abstractions collaged from junk mail, discarded cereal boxes, and the like, and painted with bright acrylic at its periphery.And it grows not just at its edges and outward—its interior changes too. Its panels exist in multiple generations, as life happens to its denizens, as the fate dealt by Gretzinger’s omnipotent deck of cards brings new infrastructure projects, connections between one city and another, the loss of farmland, and so on. Or so it was until the VOID appeared in the third generation and began to obliterate entire cities. And beyond that, the RED DIMENSION!
In less breathless terms, as of fall 2017, the map consists of almost 3,500 panels worked with acrylic, marker, colored pencil, ink, and collage on inkjet prints, whose evolution is dictated by a deck of cards and a set of instructions that decree particular changes to it. The cards might call for panel “North 17, West 33,” for example, to receive a new transportation hub. In this case, that panel would be scanned and retired from the active layer of the map. In its place, Gretzinger would insert the scan with the transportation hub collaged or painted on top, in accordance with the dictates of the heartless cards. Some panels have gone through this process many times, others not even once. In the early 2000s, Gretzinger created a new card for the deck—NEW VOID—that demands blanking out certain sections and their doomed populaces. And lately, some RED DIMENSION has appeared within the map. Most recently, another dimension, BLACK NESS, has appeared to replace parts of the RED DIMENSION.
Because of its vast size, the map has only once been shown in its entirety, on the floor of the Hunter Theater at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 2012. Smaller sections have been installed everywhere from coffee shops near Maple City, Michigan, where the artist lives, to the contemporary art museum Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2015. In 2016, it was the centerpiece of the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan. As to the map’s future, in 2005, Gretzinger began inviting others to submit guest panels. This makes it theoretically possible for the map to continue to evolve after he himself has disappeared into the VOID.
Laura Steward, “Jerry Gretzinger. Journey to Another Dimension,” in Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic, ed. Valérie Rousseau (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2018).