I Was Given a Box of Mail-Art From 1979

Needless to say I have a strong online mail-art presence. I post images of the mail-art I receive all over the place. I post to IUOMA, I post to my own blogs, and most importantly, I post to Facebook. Sometimes I post on my own profile, other times to specific online groups, but mostly to people interested in mail-art. Because of this voluminous amount of posting, people seem to know that I make mail-art, especially people that aren’t interested in it at all. Once every four of five months a friend might ask if I’m “still sending.”

There’s not too many people in my backyard that have any interest in mail-art, or at least not people that would call themselves “makers,” or worse, “artists.” It’s much easier to engage with mail-artists on the other side of the world than artists less than a mile from me. So I was surprised when someone outside of the network came to me with information.

A couple years ago a friend / artist / teacher / gnarly dude / named Andrew Fansler said that he knew about mail-art and even had a box of it stuck somewhere. It was an intriguing statement about something that few have interest in. It rarely appears somewhere, in a pile, just waiting to be digitized and shared with the world. Oh yeah, I was interested.

He said that he would try and locate it, but he thought a friend may have ended up with the box. Andrew was given the box when he was working with SECCA (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art) in Winston Salem North Carolina. He said the museum was just going to throw it out, so he took the box home. The details about the box were slim, but he said he knew it came from a show the gallery had there years ago.

The two of us go back and forth about the box for a little while, but nothing comes of it. I figured the box had been tossed out for good, or that it was lost in a move. So I dropped it, and didn’t think of this rouge box of mail-art anymore for the next couple of years.

I’m not sure how the box popped up, but during my fall break from teaching, I was talking with Andrew about the box once again. It seems that the box was in his possession and resting at his studio space in downtown Winston-Salem. Andrew told me he’d be at the studio until 5:30. Since I was enjoying my day driving around the triad going to thrift stores, I had to hurry. Some small voice in the back of my head was thinking this would be my only chance. I showed up at the studio right before he was about to leave. In any other situation I would have been more than thrilled to have a grand tour of the space since a few of my friends had found artistic homes there, but this wasn’t that sort of visit, I wanted to see that damn box.

Sitting on a table upstairs was a cardboard box, not significant in anyway. The top of the box read “Mail Art Do Not Open.” Underneath those ominous words was “1 of 2.” Looking at the box sitting on the table I wondered to myself, “How the hell am I going to get box 2?” For a few minutes I looked through the items like a child given a birthday present. “So…” I asked, “What do you want to do with these? Do you want to sell them, let me borrow them, or…” Thankfully Andrew told me to take them, they were mine, oh so mine. Of course they came with a responsibility, I had to share the contents.

I put them in the passenger seat of my car and stared at the box for a little while, wondering what names I would discover inside.

At home I spread them out on my kitchen table, looking for names I recognized. Right off the bat I saw both Bennett’s John and Meryl, I saw John Held Jr., I saw Al Ackerman, and I saw The Lomholt Mail Art Archive, which has an amazing site I check daily. I was struck by the large amount of mail-artists from North Carolina. I liked seeing postcards from non-existent countries. My next step was to compile a list of all the mail-artists.