Douglas Galloway | No. 0003
Cherry Valley, CA

Douglas Galloway | No. 0002
Cherry Valley, CA

Our first envelopes are arriving!

Douglas Galloway No. 0001
Cherry Valley, CA

Call for Mail Art

Postmarked 2011 7th Annual International Mail Art Exhibition and Silent Auction Fundraiser

Requesting your original mail art for display and sale to raise funds for The Claremont Forum's Prison Library Project (PLP). The PLP is a prison book and literacy program which sends thousands of books, study aids, educational and spiritual resources to inmates nationwide.

Please send submissions of mail art of any size and medium to:

Postmarked 2011
Prison Library Project
112 Harvard #303
Claremont CA 91711

Entries must be postmarked by May 31, 2011

**** ONLY the side with the official USPS Postmark/barcode will be displayed*** Your mail art may be painted, stamped, collaged, printed, and/or otherwise decorated or constructed. It may be any shape and size that will go through the mail and receive an official postmark. It may get worn or torn through the mail, but the handling process is an important part of the theme. Only the side with the postmark can be displayed, due to space limitations, but the art doesn't have to be limited to that side. You may include any message inside the envelope, which will be opened only by the person who purchases the art envelope. You may submit more than one piece… and begin sending now!

For more information contact Rachel at r.p.mcdonnell@gmail.com

What is mail art? (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art (but also music, sound art, poetry, etc.) through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art. The term networking is often used to describe Mail Art activities, based on the principles of barter and equal one-to-one collaboration.

After a peak in popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mail Art phenomenon has gradually migrated to the Internet, whose “social networks” were largely anticipated and predicted by the interactive processes of postal collaborations. Nevertheless, Mail Art is still practiced by thousands of mail artists from the most varied backgrounds.

"Out of the reasonable assumption that the commercial gallery system is limited and perhaps corrupt, many artists emerging in the 1970s and 1980s around the world decided it would be more feasible to exhibit their work not through galleries and ancillary museums but through the postal system, especially if they lived in areas where galleries and other artists were scarce. For the production of imagery, they drew often upon xerography (photocopying) and the earlier technology of rubber stamps. They would also announce exhibitions in venues previously devoid of art, such as city halls in remote parts of the world, ideally accepting everything submitted and issuing a catalog with names, usually accompanied by addresses and selected reproductions. While such work had little impact upon commercial galleries (and the “art magazines” dependent upon galleries’ ads), one result was a thriving alternative culture, calling itself ‘The Eternal Network’, as intensely interested in itself as serious artists have always been." ^[1]