In an age when the stars and a machine can do the job, artist Joyce Kozloff wants us to look at maps as a tool, not just a means of finding our way around.

Kozloff’s sweeping retrospective, Contested Territories, is on an acclaimed tour at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, where it will be on display until April. The exhibition spans four decades of her “activist cartography,” which uses maps not as neutral documents of geographers but as places for history, memory, and a political statement.

Where a mapmaker’s tool produces clean lines and clearly defined areas, Kozloff’s maps are intensely tactile. She takes ordinary maps, ranging from 17th-century nautical maps to up-to-date tactical toposheets, and paints over them with patterns inspired by ceramics and collage. Where the mapmaker has drawn arbitrary lines demarcating areas subjugated by empires, Kozloff leaves a tangle of cultures.

This exhibition shows how “making” can mean “unmaking” something. By painting over the lines drawn by mapmakers of contested areas, Kozloff strips them of power. Through her work, she shows us that the world exists not just in the mapped area but between the lines where people live.