At a recent art opening in Chicago, the Carrie Secrist Gallery was given over to maps. Considering the gallery's owner represents Antonia Contro, an artist whose work has long alluded to travel and exploration, the display wasn't entirely foreign. A little more unexpected was what Secrist had said a few days earlier.

When asked for someone else who could speak to the appeal of maps, Secrist replied, "Basically the entire city is talking about maps right now. Anywhere you turn, you'll find something" —- conjuring an image of pages from a Rand McNally Atlas whipping down the Windy City's streets.

Rendered on a map, the cultural institutions taking part in Chicago's Festival of Maps (www.festivalofmaps.com) —- the event to which Secrist was referring —- are a series of some 20 red dots. (The map, incidentally, is by Rand McNally, headquartered in the city.) Not since a 1952 Baltimore exhibition has the country seen a citywide celebration of cartography on this scale. Nor is Chicago alone.

Cartography today is ubiquitous and accessible. The Internet has made it so that just about anyone can be a cartographer; the simple click of a mouse lets you map the distance from A to B. Yet even as our mapping has become more sophisticated, with the uncanny accuracy born of global positioning and satellite imagery, it's the aesthetic of maps with the least utilitarian value that seems most to capture our imaginations: Playful or politically minded map art that transforms a familiar landscape. Ancient renderings printed on vellum or Egyptian papyrus.

About three years ago, John Krygier, an associate professor of geography at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, first noticed "a phenomenal explosion of map art." With a colleague he set about editing a special issue of the professional journal Cartographic Perspectives to document the interest in maps among artists. "Art & Mapping" was published last winter.

Artists such as Contro and 11 others are featured in "The Legend Altered: Maps as Method and Medium," the Carrie Secrist Gallery exhibition. And artists such as Nikolas Schiller.

Except Schiller hesitates when asked to define what he does. Is the young D.C. resident an artist? Is he a mapmaker?

"I make pretty maps or artistic maps," he says, searching for the right description, "or boutique maps." He finally settles on "conceptual cartographer."

Schiller takes U.S. Geological Survey aerial photographs and plays with them.

"The Quilt Projection" —- which his Web site (www.nikolasschiller.com) calls "A Journey Through Geometric Geography" —- is his most prolific series. It consists of 350 images that look less like maps and more like something you might see peering through a kaleidoscope.

There are the "quilted" neighborhoods of Mount Vernon in Baltimore, and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. There is George Washington University in D.C., which Schiller attended for a time, and the University of Texas at Austin. Look close enough and you can identify familiar landmarks: streets, parks, a monument. But step back and the tessellation makes for a wonderfully abstract mosaic.

Schiller is something of a curator of maps. He can point one to Web sites of antique maps, industry maps, and calendars detailing map exhibits around the world. The Internet, it would seem, abounds with cartograms. Twice, he mentions the Waldseemuller Map.

Printed in 1507, it is considered the first modern world map, the first to identify a new land mass called "America" —- and the world's most valuable at $10 million. The Waldseemuller is currently on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, as part of "Exploring the Early Americas," which opened Dec. 13.

In his gorgeous coffee-table book "Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations" —- with more than 250 of the Library of Congress's 5.5 million maps —- author Vincent Virga refers to the Waldseemuller as "America's birth certificate." He describes how it was printed: on 12 separate sheets of paper using woodblock plates. When assembled, the map measures 4 feet by 8 feet.

To see the way maps reflect our worldview, you need only compare the Islamic maps in the book, where Mecca is at the center, to the Christian maps centered on Jerusalem.

"The book has definitely hit a nerve," says Virga, "and it's thrilling."

Barnes & Noble has included it in its Holiday Gift Catalog.

"I think people are hungry for connection, and maps connect us with each other. Every single culture produces maps. It is a human impulse to explore where we live," says Virga, explaining the book's popularity.

And maps are essentially narratives. They tell where we have been and where we might go. They are history and interpretation. Fact and fantasy. All of which make them good fodder for novels and art volumes, as well as atlases.

Among the spate of cartography-themed books released this year is the handsome catalog for "Maps: Finding Our Place in the World," the current exhibition at Chicago's Field Museum in collaboration with the Newberry Library —- two other participants in the Festival of Maps.