In Long Beach, arts institutions commissioned mail art by more than 80 South Bay artists and illustrators.
mail art
Here’s How You Can Help Save the US Postal Service
From signing petitions to stocking up on art-inspired stamps, here are some small but vital ways you can help keep USPS afloat in spite of Trump’s targeted attacks.
A Mail Art Project Creates Space for Collective Mourning and Exchange
Organized by Diya Vij and Theodore (ted) Kerr, MOURN ON THE 4th of JULY rejects “patriotic fanfare,” inviting responses from artists, writers, and organizers nationwide.
A Couple’s Years-Long Mail Art Correspondence Leads to a Workshop
Over the past six years, artist David Horvitz has sent hundreds of pieces of mail art to his wife, the curator Zanna Gilbert, at the museums she’s worked at.
A Portrait of Ray Johnson in His Own Words
Soberscove Press has released nearly 200 pages of interviews with renowned mail artist Ray Johnson, and a preview excerpt can be found here.
In Vietnam, an Exhibition Reveals How Friendship Nourishes Artists
In Vietnam, networks of artist friends have built thriving communities of discourse and collaboration outside official structures.
The Tactile Temptation of Ray Johnson’s Assemblages
Ray Johnson’s exhibition at Matthew Marks is proof that the eccentric collage and mail artist’s works were never meant for gallery walls.
You’ve Got Email (Art)
A new web-based project will slide art directly into your inbox once a month, with each iteration representing a digital solo show by a different artist for your own private viewing.
Man of Letters: Ray Johnson Art in Motion
While the increased availability of Ray Johnson’s letters, notes, and statements subtilizes our understanding of this legendarily well-connected yet enigmatic artist, his flattened logorrheia is also just fun to read.
One Artist’s Plan to Save the US Postal Service
The United States Postal Service is in crisis: hemorrhaging money, searching for ways to fix the situation and being blocked by Congress, inching towards privatization. What can any of us do about? Not much, except send more mail. That’s the idea behind artist Jennie Ottinger’s new project, called, cleverly, “Postal Mortem.”
Remembering the West Coast Mail Art Scene
SAN FRANCISCO — While we tumble, tweet, and post our remixes of media online in a daily creative dialogue, it helps to remember that the history of creative correspondence extends to well before the internet.
Subscribe to Art Practical’s Mail Art Series
What’s better than looking at art? Having it arrive on your doorstep!
In honor of Art Practical’s fiftieth issue, “Printed Matter,” we invite you to subscribe to the Art Practical Mail Art Subscription series. As a subscriber you will receive works of art as correspondence from each of six artists, starting in March 2012.
Each artist will explore and respond to Art Practical’s archive in a form of their choosing—a text, letter, photograph, drawing, etc.—which you will receive in the mail, once a month for six months. The articles the artists respond to are catalysts for the correspondence, an idea expressed by the writer that prompts reflection, retort, or inquiry in one direction or another. And they encourage subscribers to reply in turn, via a postcard enclosed with each piece of mail art.
The subscription will be produced in a limited edition of 150 prints for each artist; subscribers will receive a print, a copy of the original article, and a return postcard once a month for six months, for a total of six installments of Mail Art.