1931 / 1940s Yosemite
DESCRIPTION
Jo Mora turns Yosemite Valley into a sprawling outdoor playground in this celebrated pictorial map, filling its cliffs, waterfalls, forests, trails, and meadows with hikers, climbers, skiers, wildlife, automobiles, and the artist's unmistakable humor.
Looking east through Yosemite Valley, Mora places many of the park's most famous landmarks within a dramatic bird's-eye view. Half Dome rises prominently near the upper center, while El Capitan, Yosemite Falls, Bridalveil Fall, Cathedral Spires, Sentinel Rock, Glacier Point, Clouds Rest, and the Merced River are easily recognizable. Throughout the landscape, tiny figures hike trails, scale cliffs, ride horses, ski, fish, camp, photograph scenery, and encounter the park's wildlife. Mora turns several place names into visual jokes: Clouds Rest becomes a cloud reclining in a chair, Cathedral Spires are accompanied by a bishop, and the landscape is filled with similar bits of wordplay and comic observation.
Finding Humor in Yosemite's Grandeur
Mora explains his approach in the inscription running across the top of the map, writing that Yosemite possesses so much "Grandeur and reverential Solemnity" that a little humor might help visitors reconcile themselves to the "triviality of Man." That philosophy governs the entire image. Yosemite's monumental cliffs and waterfalls remain imposing, but people become tiny, energetic characters scrambling across the landscape below them. Decorative panels along the left border advertise fishing, horseback riding, campfire circles, swimming, dancing, the Fire Fall, tennis, golf, winter sports, and other activities available to visitors, providing a colorful record of recreation in Yosemite during the first half of the twentieth century.
The lower portion of the map records another side of the Yosemite experience: the rapidly growing importance of automobile tourism. Cars stream along the Yosemite All-Year Highway, pass through the checking station, and enter the valley beneath the enormous granite walls. At El Portal, Mora depicts the Yosemite Valley Railroad bringing another generation of visitors toward the park. Hotels, camps, ranger facilities, roads, trails, and other visitor infrastructure appear throughout the valley, making the map an entertaining record of how Americans experienced Yosemite during the years when national parks were becoming major destinations for middle-class tourism.
One of Jo Mora's Classic Cartes
Joseph Jacinto "Jo" Mora was an illustrator, sculptor, writer, photographer, and one of America's best-known pictorial mapmakers. He called his highly illustrated maps "cartes," combining recognizable geography with history, local characters, jokes, wildlife, architecture, and everyday life. Mora originally created Yosemite in 1931 as a much larger black-and-white map. At the request of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, the design was later revised and issued in this smaller color format, removing and updating several features while transforming the original drawing into one of Mora's most visually appealing works. The result captures both the majesty of Yosemite and the sometimes chaotic experience of the people who came to see it, exactly the contrast Mora intended.
CONDITION
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