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Themes
During the 1960s, artists from around the world looked to the postal system as an alternative means of producing, distributing, and receiving art. "Mail art" (alternatively called “correspondence art” or “postal art”) thus emerged as a form of artistic practice in which an international network of participants reflexively used the mail to make art and share it with others.
Collaborative Correspondence features 23 pieces of mail art from the international mail art movement (1960s-1990s), selected from the collections of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. They relate to 6 broad themes:
• Media Matters (Works that stress the materiality of postal communication)
• Alternative Art Worlds (Works that actively circumvent the art market and attempt to commandeer its communication networks)
• Political Dissent (Works that use the national mail against governmental constraints)
• Queer Correspondence (Works that push against the regulation of gender and sexuality by mass media and censorious postal statues)
• Local Scenes (Works that forge localized (and often underground) communities of mail artists)
• Global Network (Works that connect artists across disparate global localities).
This site has been curated by Miriam Kienle in conjunction with University of Kentucky students in her Fall 2016 seminar entitled, “Collage, Collaboration & the International Mail Art Movement.” Select objects labels for individual works of art have been written by each of the participating students. The final product of this collaboration was the exhibition "Pushing the Envelope" at Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.