Art on a Journey It started with an idea Darren Di Lieto had: Challenge illustrators and designers to create works of art on packages, envelopes and postcards - then actually send them to him through the mail. The response was overwhelming, and Di Lieto posted photos of each piece of art on MailMeArt.com , so people the world over could follow the art on its journey from artist to post office to computer screen. The images are preserved in this book to inspire you as well. Inside, discover: 200 of the best pieces of mail art from the project, showcasing the variety and depth of the international illustration community. Interviews with 17 of the artists - including Jon Burgerman, Dan May, Kristian Olson, Michael Slack, Catalina Estrada and Jeff Miracola - that give insight into the work and the spirit of the project. Darren Di Lieto's firsthand experience of the challenges and joys of organizing this worldwide project, from storing the mail art to the daily anticipation of art in the mailbox. Mail Me Art began with an idea. It became a community. But it doesn't end there. Open this book, experience the array of mail art illustration, and become part of the journey.

“What is a good mail day?” A good mail day is a day when, instead of just bills, catalogs, and advertisements, your postal carrier delivers artful, beautiful, personal mail from friends and acquaintances all over the world. Mail art is a collaborative art form with a long and fascinating history populated by famous artists as well as everyday practitioners. The term “mail art” refers to pieces of art sent through the mail rather than displayed or sold in traditional venues. Mail artists often use inexpensive and recycled materials including postcards, collage, rubber stamps, and photocopied images. Mail art is a truly international activity and a fun way to connect with people in every corner of the globe. Readers will learn to create decorated and illustrated envelopes, faux postage and artistamps, find penpals, make a mail art kit, and much more!

This long out-of-print anthology, edited by Mary Stofflet and Michael Crane and published in 1984, is the authoritative work on correspondence art. This anthology was compiled during the peak of correspondence art activity, with contributions from many of the medium's major players. Contributors: Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Ulises Carrion, Judith A. Hoffberg, Marily Ekdahl Ravicz, Jean-Marc Poinsot, Thomas Cassidy, Milan Knizak, Klaus Groh, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Richard Craven, A.M. Fine, Tomas Schmit, Thomas Albright, Anna Banana, Andrzej Partum, Stephan Kukowski, Robert Reehfeldt, Steve Hitchcock, Edgardo-Antonio Vigo, Geoffrey Cook, Gaglione 1940-2040, C.E. Loeffler, Ken Friedman, Georg M. Gugelberger, James Warren Felter, and Peter Frank.

Although increasingly appreciated in fine art and stamp collecting circles, artist postage stamps, or artistamps, are more likely to be traded between the people who create them than they are to be exhibited in commercial art galleries or read about in philatelic journals. Artistamps are part and parcel of the grassroots network known as Mail Art, an alternative art of creative long-distance communication that intuited the demand for cross-cultural exchange long before the Internet. Although seemingly rigid, the postage stamp format allows flexible approaches in painting, watercolor, offset, photography, photocopy, rubber-stamping, engraving, digitization and sculpture.

In art making, materials and media are the intermediaries between private ideas, thoughts and feelings, and their external manifestation in a tangible, sensual form. Thus, materials provide the core components of the exchange that occurs between art therapists and clients. This book focuses on the sensory-based, tangible vocabulary of materials and media and its relevance to art therapy. It provides a historical account of the theory and use of materials and media in art therapy, as well as an examination of the interface between art therapy, contemporary art materials and practices, and social/critical theory. Contributing authors provide examples of how art therapists have transgressed conventional material boundaries and expanded both thinking and practice in the field. The chapters discuss traditional as well as innovative media, such as body adornments, mail and video art, and comic books. An accompanying DVD contains media clips, as well as 69 color images.

The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems - money, logos, corporate names, stamps - to create intimate situations among the participants. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus's Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. -- Publisher.