Mail Art Project — 2020

For the months of May — December, 2020 (aka during COVID, although COVID continued on further), I started a mail art subscription service. For $20, subscribers would get a month of 3-5 random artworks sent to them through the standard mail.

The project was capped at 30 subscribers a month at the most, with new subscriptions opening at the end of the month and announced on social media. My idea behind this project was to make a series of accessible artworks available to people who, like me, were having an awful time during lockdown, and might want to look forward to something fun coming in the mail. It was also a way of supporting the USPS which had undergone a massive restructuring under Trump, and seemed poised to be shut at the time I started it.

Throughout the seven months I kept the project going, I tried to respond to different things going on around me. If you look through the incomplete archive, you’ll see references to Black Lives Matter, the election, and various holidays. I tried to generally keep the pieces upbeat or at least not overtly depressing; genuine and honest, while also not as bleak as I sometimes felt during this time. I came to see this project as an act of love among (mostly) strangers; I knew a few of the people who subscribed, but most of them were people I would never have connected to before. At a time when I felt probably the most distant from others and lonely in my life, this project gave me a sense of connection that I was missing being isolated from work and social gatherings.

I reluctantly had to call it quits by the end of December 2020, just because I had other responsibilities to tend to, and the US mail service seemed to deteriorate to a point that pieces were often getting lost. The plan is to revisit it in the spring, to see if I can start it up again.

If you want to read more about it, click here for an article in the Philly Inquirer. There are some pics below, or for an incomplete archive of works, go here.