Bring Your Favorite City Home With Modern Map Art

The fine folks at Modern Map Art (affiliate link) provided me with a Chicago map poster in exchange for this post. All opinions are, obviously, mine.

I’ve been furiously collecting Chicago-themed stuff lately. It’s for my new home office: I intend to surround myself with items inspired by my hometown. A few weeks ago I went to the One of a Kind Show and Sale at the Merchandise Mart with my friend Natasha, bringing along all the great intentions of buying holiday gifts for loved ones. Somehow I ended up with just a couple of gifts for others and three–THREE!–Chicago-themed things for myself. Oh well.

With my eye and adoration for cool Chicago stuff, you can imagine my delight when I opened an email two weeks ago to find a request to review a Chicago map poster from Modern Map Art. That email made my day.

The posters come in a variety of colors and I decided on black and white to keep things simple. When it arrived I was excited to write about it but didn’t want to do that before I got it framed because I procrastinate fiercely on all kinds of things but I guess when it comes to the Windy City, I want my enjoyment NOW.

I took the cylinder to another friend, Meggan, who manages a custom frame shop right down the road. I like going to see Meggan at work for lots of reasons; one of them is because I enjoy the shop talk. I used to do custom framing for years back in the day and trading horror stories and tales of triumph with someone who gets it is really fun.

Sidenote: One such horror story is the time my co-worker put a–let’s say vintage–sheepskin diploma in the dry mount press. Did you know that you shouldn’t apply heat to those kinds of things? Well, now you do. We got the diploma replaced for the customer but the college was no longer using sheepskin and instead sent us one on parchment. Yikes. Those mistakes stick with you forever.

Anyway, I started taking the poster out of the cylinder and showed Meggan the black frame I picked out. She approved (hurray!) and offered to get the poster dry mounted and into the frame for me while I hung there with her. (Thanks, Meggan!)

Modern Map Art Chicago

What I think about this poster: I love it. I framed it (err, Meggan framed it) with the “Chicago” strip at the bottom but you could also cut that part off and just frame the map if you want something a little more abstract. (I might do that eventually.) I like that the street names aren’t on the poster: it feels more artsy that way. It looks fantastic in the frame and I can’t wait to get it on my wall!

Modern Map Chicago
Forgive the glare: getting a good picture of a black poster under regular glass without a glare is nearly impossible.

Modern Map Art has tons of cities to choose from, and not just posters, either. Check out their Chicago gifts and decor as well as all of their other goodies here (affiliate link)! They even have smaller cities represented (Appleton, Wisconsin! Bloomington, Indiana! Hershey, Pennsylvania! Jersey City, New Jersey! I mean, come on! Cool!), which is something you don’t usually see. Go check them out, and let me know if you pick up something new for your wall (or your bed: they make pillows, too)!