15 Facts About Mail art

Mail art, known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service.

Media commonly used in mail art include postcards, paper, a collage of found or recycled images and objects, rubber stamps, artist-created stamps, and paint, but can include music, sound art, poetry, or anything that can be put in an envelope and sent via post.

Mail art can be seen as anticipating the cyber communities founded on the Internet.

Artist Edward M Plunkett has argued that communication-as-art-form is an ancient tradition; he posits that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet.

Growth of a sizable mail art community, with friendships born out of personal correspondence and, increasingly, mutual visits, led in the 1980s to the organization of several festivals, meetings and conventions where networkers could meet, socialize, perform, exhibit and plan further collaborations.

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The Internet facilitated faster dissemination of mail art calls and precipitated the involvement of a large number of newcomers.

Mail art has been exhibited in alternative spaces such as private apartments, municipal buildings, and shop windows, as well as in galleries and museums worldwide.

Mail art is widely practiced in Europe, North and South America, Russia, Australia and Japan, with smaller numbers of participants in Africa, and China.

Various essays, graduate theses, guides and anthologies of mail art writings have appeared in print and on the Internet, often written by veteran networkers.

Mail art has adopted and appropriated several of graphic forms already associated with the postal system.

Mail art has appropriated the postage stamp as a format for individual expression.

Copy Mail art is a common practice, with both mono and color copying being extensively used within the network.

Music and sound art have long been celebrated aspects of mail art, at first using cassette tape, then on CD and as sound files sent via the Internet.

Performance art has been a prominent facet, particularly since the advent of mail art meetings and congresses.

Where a painting always involves paint and a support surface, correspondence art can appear as any one of dozens of media transmitted through the mail.