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During the Age of Discovery, a period beginning in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th, European ships sailed to Africa and the New World in search of new trade routes and partners in a major effort of outward expansion.

Fueled by burgeoning capitalism, the explorers of the day brought with them cartographers who mapped out the new lands they discovered to be sure that they could make their way back and forth. Many wanted to find a route to Asia through the west from Europe, and mapmakers again played a crucial role in doing so.

Just as Portugal and Spain led the exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries, they did so as well in mapmaking. England and France soon followed, and by the 17th century, both countries' cartographers had played a significant role in the mapping of the globe.

By then, cartography also came to be used for military purposes, for depicting battlefields, troop maneuvers and fortifications. Maps were also important for administrative purposes: nation-states were growing fast, and maps helped in governing them.

Yet for the important role maps have played throughout history, for anyone who has studied them -- especially the older ones -- one thing is predominately clear: they almost are never correct.

For New York artist Joyce Kozloff, there is something inherently beautiful in this fact.

That's why, in 1998, she began to paint a series of small frescoes based on old maps she had found in history books she called her "Knowledge" series.

All told, she created 75 such works, as well as several plaster-coated school globes that are mostly derived from 16th-century maps, with a few dating as far back as 150 A.D.

Why paint in fresco form, that is, to put pigment directly into wet plaster? Because the technique was at its height during the Age of Discovery, when many of the maps she used as her sources were charted.

Altogether, they're quirky works that not only reveal the interests and discoveries of the times, but also the many fears, false notions and superstitions that plagued explorers of the day.

"It's about the arbitrariness of knowledge," Kozloff says of the series. "They're all based on old maps that are wrong. They represented the knowledge of their time, which highlights the arbitrariness of knowledge."

Twenty of those frescoes and four globes from the series are on display in the exhibition "Joyce Kozloff: Exterior and Interior Cartographies" on view through Oct. 15 at Regina Gouger Miller Gallery in Carnegie Mellon University's Purnell Center for the Arts.

It's just one of several series derived from maps on display by the artist, who just happens to be an alumnus of the University.

Having earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from then Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1964, Kozloff moved to New York City, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. She has lived ever since.

Since the early '70s, Kozloff has been fascinated with combining words, patterns and images into complexly layered works. Largely associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement, she oftentimes touched upon issues of feminism and colonialism in her pieces.

Likewise, the works in the show are not without their own particularly pointed arguments.

For example, one wall is lined with works from her "Boy's Art" series. "These are all the sites of battles all over the world and at different times," Kozloff says about the small collages containing bits and pieces of military maps, images of toy soldiers and a plethora of childhood drawings. "I Xeroxed down my son's childhood drawings of battles that he incessantly did over the years," the artist says about the cartoonish drawings. "It's about the formation of masculinity. A lot of little boys do these types of drawings."

Another wall contains a massive oil-on-shaped-canvas painting of a splayed globe. Titled "Dark and Light Competence," Kozloff says the painting is a layering of two maps -- a satellite photograph of the earth at night over which little star stickers replicate the configuration of a cosmological chart of the heavens from 1600. "So this is actually the northern sky with the constellations," Kozloff says. "So the idea is that you are up in the sky looking down from the heavens through the stars of the earth."

"It's also about energy distribution," she says, "The way the earth is viewed from a satellite at night."

Another standout is "Rocking the Cradle," a sculpture of an oversized, early-American-style cradle. Inside the cradle is painted a map of Baghdad. "This piece was done during the invasion of Iraq. It's based on an ancient map of Mesopotamia," Kozloff says. "The New York Times, every day, had a diagram of the troop movements as they got closer to Baghdad. So each day I painted the next thing until the city was surrounded."

In addition to the exhibition, there is a video work on display titled "Disarming Images."

Sponsored by the New York-based collective Artists Against the War, of which Kozloff is a member, the three-channel video is an amalgam of images of Americans publicly protesting the ongoing war.

The video and photographic images were culled by artists Elaine Angelopoulos, Carole Ashley and Debra Werblud from footage and media coverage of antiwar demonstrations made between 2001 and 2005.

Ann Messner, creative director of "Disarming Images," says the artists created the video because they felt that mainstream media wasn't covering the protests adequately, and wanted to portray it as if it was.

"It was conceived to be sort of all encompassing, like too much information that could possibly be taken in during one viewing, which is sort of a parallel to the experience," Messner says.

"In terms of what was going on at the time, there was just so much information, chaos and confusion in the media and in terms of what we were being told. And there was a lot more public resistance to the government's decision of what to do post-9/11 and subsequently to invading Iraq."

Although the points in both Kozloff's work and that of Artists Against the War are nearly all about the Iraqi war, still, regardless of one's own personal opinion about the situation, they make for a stunning visual experience that's not to be missed before Oct. 15.

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