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0 The beauty of all the mail art initiatives that have sprung up in the past few months is that anyone and everyone can partake.
With studios and galleries shuttered around the world, artists these days are being forced to find new ways to make and share their work—and many are turning to the US Postal service for help.
Mail art, a form that goes back more than six decades, is enjoying a mini-renaissance, with a number of postal projects popping up in recent weeks as people seek a form of connection not mediated by screens.
Many campaigns—such as the one organized by Nashville-based artist Jason Brown, who is collecting works of art by anyone willing to submit them—are meant to document this unprecedented moment. (The works collected by Brown will be donated to the Vanderbilt University Library.)
Others are more absurdist in nature, channeling the roots of the art form. For instance, Civilization, a print publication made up of conversations overheard in New York, will send you a customized artwork through the mail for $3.
The idea was to create a form of artistic production that bypassed the institutionalized channels of the contemporary art world and democratized the process of dissemination.
And even today, the model is democratic, which is a big part of the appeal, says Johanna Rietveld, a manager of the New York-based bookstore Printed Matter.
“Anybody can be a mail artist and become part of that network. Even if you don’t feel like a mail artist, you are a mail artist.”
Through Printed Matter, Rietveld launched an open call for mail art submissions in early April with a simple prompt: “We live in real time.”
“It’s about experiencing the moment, moving through life in real-time, while also looking ahead to the moment when we’ll be thinking back on it,” she says, explaining the impetus for the project. “So much changed within a few days. You couldn’t plan ahead. It’s about living very day-to-day life.”
