MAIL ART NEWS

incoming mail from mailartmagic Short and sweet this week, mail art friends. Happened to see this experimental mail art video by Rafael González .  Soundtrack by GX Jupitter-Larsen. Love it! Another drawing converted to mail art. This time, an alien reading through The Laws of Earth  has determined the book to be full of strange idiotic poetry, but there may be some good and useful things contained therein.  "Strange idiotic poetry, but I guess there's some good stuff in there." T. Brown 2023 Rubber stamp alert. Seen on Facebook. Comments from Mark Bloch :  "This is my favorite contribution (of mine) to mail art, a rubber stamp I made that sums up how I feel about all of you: YOU are the art, YOU are better than art. Just like when Hans Ruedi Fricker says that mail art is not fine art, it is the artist who is fine , it is my belief that mail art is not visual art, but more about process, more about the human experience. So if you want to know where the art is, go doo

  Frederick Tolhurst, 1921 (source: The Guardian ) Early 1900s Mail Art When was mail art invented? With human civilization going back thousands of years, the fact that some of those civilizations had postal systems indicates that we might find some really old examples of mail art. The first postcard is currently agreed to be the Penny Penates . You can click on the link to learn more about it. "The Penny Penates postcard was mailed to Theodore Hook—probably by himself—from London to Fulham, England, on 14 July 1840. Hook presumably intended the card as a humorous practical joke poking fun at the postal workers who would have processed it." Commercially available postcards began appearing in the 1860s. The  decorated envelopes from the US Civil War  period (1860s) are also part of the story, including this printed envelope from 1861 . It's written in comedic dialect, which is difficult to understand, but the style of it wouldn't look out of place if it showed up in my

QR code artistamps from Sarah Roe Baltimore. Maryland. USA. Mail art. This is by no means a comprehensive encyclopedic account of the mail artists who call / have called the Baltimore metropolitan area home. Per usual, this blog post is the result of a combination of internet search and reaching out to one or more people by email or instant message.   A search last week for "mail art" Baltimore resulted in a number of examples of early 1900s mail art, so next week, I will take a further look at decorated envelopes from this period. The Pinterest page indicates that this item, sent to a relative living in Baltimore in 1909, was found in a   phot o album belonging to a man named William Edward Kerr, of Portland Oregon.  In the 1960s, Baltimore-born May Wilson moved to New York and became an underground artist and a close correspondent with Ray Johnson.  Take a look at the trailer for the documentary Woo Who? May Wilson . Ahh, fascinating stuff. Something about New York in the