![]() The two witnesses were the owner, Sherry McInerney, and the manager, Sherry Allor. I found a local art gallery down the street from my house with a really nice front window, Posterity Gallery. The witnesses had to log in and log out every day. ![]() And they required me to have two witnesses that had to watch the entire process of me drawing. The maze had to be done in a public place, and they were hard to come by. Because we were in the middle of the pandemic, things were exacerbated. I think the guidelines are probably the hardest part. Drawing the maze was only half the challenge. When I applied, they gave me a full book of stipulations that I had to follow or I could be disqualified. Record-breaking maze rolled up Courtesy Michelle Boggess-Nunley What’s the process of actually getting a world record confirmed? It sounds like it could be complicated. All the pieces just kind of fit together: I can beat the world record, I can raise money for this cause, just burn some time, and make a giant maze. Two of them are official world record holders, Joe Woes and Eric Eckert. There’s only maybe a handful of us that do this in the whole world, and every year we make a book together. But then I got connected with a lot of other maze artists. How did you go from making a big maze for charity to breaking a world record?Īt first it was something that was just going to be fun: We’re going to sit in a gallery window and make this giant maze and people are going to get involved and we’re going to raise money. So I had the idea of doing a really big maze to raise money for the organization Detroit Living Arts. ![]() I teach children and seniors how to draw and paint, and there was none of that going on because the fundraisers weren’t happening for these organizations. And the days went on, the weeks went on, the months went on. Then, during the pandemic, we had that period where nobody was working, especially if you were in the service industry or doing anything with people. I did a couple children’s maze books and some coloring books with mazes. And mazes were that little puzzle piece that was missing. I was a court reporter and went into being an artist full-time. So, one day I’m like, “You know what? I’ll make a book.” I was transitioning from the corporate world. I remember drawing my first maze after getting back into it-I was probably 18, 19 years old at that point-and I remembered how much I loved it. There was a long period where I didn’t make mazes at all, maybe 10 years or so. How did you go from that to making mazes professionally? And then I thought, I could start making my own mazes, so I made a maze book for the entire third grade class. I solved them from front to back, finish to start. When I was in second grade or third grade, my mom let me get one of the Highlights maze books. Michelle Boggess-Nunley How did you get into making mazes? Click to download a PDF of the Atlas Obscura maze! You can go up stairs, but not waterfalls, and you can’t cross rocks. We spoke with Boggess-Nunley about how she got into mazes, how you stay one step ahead of solvers, and what it was like to make a single maze-in public-for months. So we tapped her to create a downloadable new maze for Atlas Obscura to help us launch our new puzzles, based on some of the wondrous locations we feature-all of which are clickable in the downloadable PDF. Jacobs’s new book, The Puzzler), exhibitions such as ArtPrize2021, and commissions, including a wall mural maze outside a local restaurant. Since putting out her first book of mazes in 2019, Boggess-Nunley’s worked on multiple other books (including A.J. The Grosse Pointe, Michigan-based artist now holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest hand-drawn maze-around 1,500 ft long, so large that it had to be photographed panoramically, wrapped around a soccer field, for the final submission. Michelle Boggess-Nunley moved from an office job to life as a professional artist a few years ago, which led her back to a childhood passion: hand-drawn mazes.
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