Signed, Sealed, Delivered:
An Exploration of Mail Art
The “mail art” movement has been rising in popularity ever since its beginnings in the 1960s. Mail art is characterized by the way that artists send poems, drawings, and other artworks through the postal service. To this day, mail art stresses the physicality of art and is designed to be handled by senders and receivers, artists and viewers, postal workers and machines, thus challenging art’s fragility and inaccessibility. Postal art also embraces the local and global connectivity that comes with sending mail as well as the postal system as a contested site.
As debates about the U.S. Postal Service became front-page news with COVID-19 social distancing protocols and the 2020 Presidential election, a group of MFA in Curatorial Studies students at the University of Kentucky put together a call for mail art that visualized the meaning of the USPS to its many patrons. These pieces were then curated into a virtual exhibition entitled Post Post?: A Mail Art Exhibition. While this exhibition was shown virtually through the end of 2020 to early 2021, this is the first time this collection of mail art has been displayed in person. These works serve as celebrations of the USPS and illustrations of our cultural moment. Some even utilized messages of positivity to try and brighten the day of any USPS worker who saw the mail.
In addition to these pieces of mail art from Post Post?, this exhibition also explores the work of two prominent mail art participants, Bob Warner and Gerald Janacek. By showcasing the work of both amateur and professional artists, this exhibition seeks to showcase the physical and thematic variety of work associated with the mail art movement.
A huge thanks to Karyn Hinkle, Miriam Kienle, Sydney Mullins, Bailey O’Leary, & Magenta Palo for their contributions to this exhibition.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered was exhibited at the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts Library in Lexington, KY from March 10-August 29, 2022.
Bob Warner
Born 1956 in Geneva, New York, Warner is a collage artist and printmaker based in NYC. Warner began his mail art career with his postal correspondence with Ray Johnson, a prominent mail artist. This relationship began in 1988 and ended when Johnson died in 1995. The collection of work shown here consists of many archived works by Warner from Bob Box 391: The Posted Objects of Robert Warner exhibited at the Bolivar Art Gallery here at UK. Many of the postcards were drawn on, cut out, and subsequently mailed. This physicality of the artwork is a key part of mail art as well as Warner’s practice. This collection of work is an important illustration of the tactile and tangible nature of mail art.
Gerald Janacek
Born 1945, Janacek is a former professor of Russian and Eastern Studies at the University of Kentucky. During his academic career, his research focused on Russian avant-garde literature of the 20th century. Outside of this research, though, Janacek was an avid participant and collector in the mail art movement of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. As you can see in this collection of mail art, there are visual (and physical) markers of a relationship between Eastern Europe imagery and the University of Kentucky. This connection becomes materialized through the physicality of mail art. Also, by including photos of people, this relationship becomes humanized and tangible. Janacek’s collection of mail art works to showcase the sense of global, human connectivity that both sending and receiving mail can provide.
