Maps have been used by people in many ways over the years—to find their way, to assert ownership, to record human activity, to establish control, to encourage settlement, to plan military campaigns, and to show political power. Maps have always been used for artistic purposes because the shapes of the familiar lend themselves well to artistic expression and reimagination. Maps are a form of expressive visual art that has both cultural and political purposes, often with deep aesthetic underpinnings. Jasper Johns put the art squarely into cartography with Map (1961), which develops his use of easily recognizable images by using the map of the United States in a colourful celebration of both the country and the map itself. The artist wanted to use an image that viewers knew so well that they simply “saw” it without having to look at or examine it in depth. Alighiero Boetti's famous work Mappa is a series of tapestries that the artist commissioned from Afghan women beginning in the 1970s and ending in 1993, together representing the moment when people began to lose the preconception that contemporary art only happened in a select few cosmopolitan cities. More recently, Clement Valla has been creating Postcards from Google Earth, painterly distortions created by Google Earth’s 3D terrain software, and masterful graphic designer Paula Scher paints info-maps of the USA, calling them “abstract-expressionist information.”