WHAT IS MAIL ART?

Unsanctioned zines printed at night on the only Xerox machine in Communist era Budapest. An international campaign to get a dissident artist out of an Uruguayan prison. A quest to bring a man’s head to its final resting place in Japan.

Long before the rise of Facebook and Twitter, artists around the world built their own social network through the postal system and called it Mail Art. Popularized by Ray Johnson in the 50’s, the network consists of thousands of artists sending small-scale artworks to each other across the planet for over six decades.

Most of these people never met in person, but through the postal system, they created a culture that subverted censorship, celebrated community, and brought thousands of artists oceans apart in collaboration with each other.

Artwork by Ray Johnson & Crackerjack Kid

THERE ARE THREE RULES OF MAIL ART

  1. If it’s sent through the mail, it’s Mail Art.

  2. Anyone can be a Mail Artist.

  3. Mail Art is always a gift between artists.

Artworks by Shawn Whatever, Crackerjack Kid, Al Ackerman and Dogfish

BONUS RULE

THERE ARE NO RULES.

Mail artists often use accessible, reproducible, and easily postable mediums. This includes postcards, rubber stamps, zines, xeroxes, artist trading cards, collages, letters, and posters.

However, part of the fun of the medium is seeing whether you can get the art past the post office, and so we’ve seen everything from a plaster cast of John Cage’s navel to paper cut outs made to look like underwear to a literal coconut with the recipient’s mailing address stamped on the outside.

Most artists will say that the art is the nature of the correspondence and relationship itself, less the physical materials that carry it from place to place.

In M.A.I.L., we’re taking inspiration from Mail Art’s mischievous and irreverent nature to develop the visuals of our film, mixing collage, printmaking, reenactments and more on screen with video interviews and archival media.

MAIL ART IN THE 21st Century

Mail Art has been an active community for decades - but its future is threatened by rising inflation and the weakening and privatization of the global postal system.

Many artists cannot afford the cost of domestic shipping fees, let alone international postage. During our travels in Latin America, we spoke to eight artists who told us they were considering or had already dropped out of the network entirely for this reason.

At the same time, as digital media provides more and more means to connect remotely, much of the community has moved to platforms like Facebook to communicate with one another. More connection is always a good thing - but unfortunately, creating physical media has dwindled, alongside the memory of when long distance creativity and political discourse relied on analogue methods.

Through this film, we hope to preserve that legacy and raise the profile of mail art so that the artworks and history are remembered long after the original community has passed.

Check out our Get Involved page for ways you can help us make that happen.

Our Website is under construction!

We will be adding more to this page in the coming months!

In the meantime, check out the Mail Art Wikipedia page, which you can access here. The page was written and regularly edited by Mail Artists, so we can attest that the information there reflects the community and its values.