What do shoes, phones, records, bottles, dolls, sculptures, tapes, skeletons, beach balls, cricket cages, and horns all have in common? They’ve all been mailed to the Flood Gallery Fine Art Center for the 12th Annual Anything Goes, Everything Shows Mail Art Exhibition.
This year’s Mail Art Opening is September 29 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm at the Flood Gallery Fine Arts Center located at 850 Blue Ridge Road in Black Mountain, NC. The exhibit will run through October 20.
Mail art is art that uses the postal system as a medium. Mail artists typically exchange ephemera in the form of illustrated letters; zines; rubberstamped, decorated, or illustrated envelopes; artist trading cards; postcards; artistamps; faux postage; mail-interviews; naked mail; friendship books, decos and three-dimensional objects.
An amorphous international mail art network, involving thousands of participants in over 50 countries, evolved between the 1950s and the present. It was influenced by other movements including Dada and Fluxus. The Flood Gallery receives hundreds of submissions from 80 countries and from throughout the US every year.
Themes could include anti-war, anti-art snobbery, anti-gallery art, love, sex, dissent, anything goes! Mail artists like to claim that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet. However, perhaps the initial genesis of mail art was in postal stationery, from which mail art is now typically distinguished (if not defined in its broadest sense). Mail Art is a celebration of our creative spirit… without gallery snobbery or exclusivity! Submissions of any size or shape will be accepted.