Speakers Bureau Speaker
Dori Griffin, Tempe
Dori Griffin is a Ph.D. candidate in design history at Arizona State University and holds an M.F.A. in graphic design from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on the role that popular visual culture plays in the conceptualization of twentieth-century domestic tourism sites and landscapes. In particular, she investigates illustrated sight-seeing maps, seeking to situate these colorful and fascinating documents in the contexts of their history, production, and use.
Presentations are suitable for high school as well as adult audiences.
Arizona Map-makers
During Arizona’s first half-century of statehood, some two dozen cartographic illustrators depicted it on widely-distributed postcards and souvenir maps. This presentation explores popular illustrated maps of Arizona, investigating the relationships between map-makers, map users, and maps as objects. Many of the map-making artists lived and worked in Arizona, and they focused much of their attention on the state, producing maps, paintings and drawings, books, photographs, and other representations of the landscapes they knew best. This interactive presentation will also examine the object-qualities of the maps, noting the similarities and differences between “local” maps and those made elsewhere. It includes biographical sketches of Arizona’s cartographic illustrators, as well as high-quality images of their maps.
Host organization provides digital projector for a PowerPoint presentation.
Ephemeral Arizona
Items originally designed to be throw-away souvenirs can, in fact, reveal a great deal about the culture of a specific time and place. This presentation showcases a wide and engaging collection of visual ephemera from Arizona’s past. Examples include; souvenirs, picture postcards, view books, site brochures, and sightseeing maps produced between 1890 and 1970. These demonstrate how Arizona’s narratives of place developed over time, in response to one another, and alongside broader cultural trends. The most common example of this phenomenon is the Grand Canyon; its earliest (white) visitors found it to be nothing more than a particularly challenging geographic obstacle, while today, Arizona is “the Grand Canyon state.” But Arizona offers a wide array of “storied” places, and this presentation focuses on the state’s less famous – but no less fascinating – locations. For audiences today, ephemera brings the historical context of a place to life!
Host organization provides digital projector.
On Tour in Arizona – Promoting Early Automobile Travel in the Grand Canyon State
Arizona retained the challenges of fin de siècle automobile travel well into the twentieth century. Mountains, canyons, deserts, and washes presented physical obstacles. The scarcity of paved roads lent a certain spirit of adventure to even the most prosaic trip. This presentation explores how early promoters of automobile tourism re-positioned the Arizona landscape as accessible and friendly. While often embellished, early descriptions of Arizona auto travel were rarely fabricated. Supported by a wide variety of images, this presentation includes maps and photographs from The Arizona Good Roads Association Illustrated Road Maps and Tour Book (1913), The W.P.A. Guide to 1930s Arizona (1940), and the Arizona Tourist and Mileage Map (1977), and explores the balance between image enhancement and truth in advertising.
Host organization provides digital projector.
Ruins & Shrines – Visual Identity & Arizona’s Kino Missions
Between 1925 and 1975, an array of locations in the American Southwest cultivated their identities as tourist destinations. Some were famous, while others remained more obscure. This presentation examines Arizona’s Spanish Catholic missions as they were imagined by commercial illustrators and travel writers. San Xavier del Bac and Tumacacori often appear in tourist literature as “Arizona’s Kino missions,” after the Jesuit priest who introduced Christianity into the Sonora desert region. Images of the missions offer an appealing visual imaginary of the Southwest’s Spanish colonial past. These representations evolved over time and responded to one another. Furthermore, they generated and perpetuated a romanticized story, where the missions starred as sacred relics of Spanish colonization in the Southwest. This presentation offers audiences a chance to probe the stories told by illustrations of the Kino missions. It draws on a collection of images from sources ranging from Arizona Highways (1926—) to The Catholic Travelers Guide to Arizona (1940).
Host organization provides digital projector.
