SEAD

A Call to Artists for “We Deliver!”

an unparalleled parallel exhibit of Mail Art and Stamp Art to celebrate the South End Arts District and benefit SEABA (South End Arts and Business District).

S. J. Kariko. Spider Stamp for Madagascar

voodoo

toaster

tina2

sunflower stamp

tina

Sunflower seads

shoe

shark

sead stamp

postcard

paper

mute sound

mail art2

lily

mail art

kelly doyle2

lily stamp

kelly doyle

i-phone

index

glass

fearnoarts

dots

chain letter

collage

untitled3

art

untitled

untitled2

SEAD_Stamps

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The exhibit will be at the SEABA Center Gallery, 404 Pine Street, Burlington.
Opening celebration reception will be on May 4th.
We Deliver! will be exhibited for the month of May.
A silent auction of the Mail Art and Stamp Art will be held on Thursday, May 17th. We thank you in advance for contributing your work.

Online at SEABA:

A collection of the most compelling Mail Art and South End Arts District BTV stamps will be featured in an online gallery on the SEABA website.
A hyperlink to your website and/or your email will be included with the image of your work. Stamp designs will be offered for use as postage stamps via stamp.com, an online postage stamp service.

A little history and context

Pushing the Envelope: The Second Annual Mail Art Exhibition Archive
“ArtAction BTV: We Deliver!” It’s official!
After a 19 year initiative, through the help of SEABA. the art rich environment of Burlington’s south end has finally been recognized as the South End Arts District. Help us celebrate with Art and Friends! The SEABA Center will be awash in Mail Art and Stamp Art that recognizes the “South End Arts District BTV” in form and function. Our hope is that this will inspire local artists and businesses to recognize the same in their addresses, letterhead and overland postage.

ArtAction BTV: We Deliver! is an art action sequel to the ArtAction initiative in 2010: Sign of the Times (organized by Marie Davis and Bren Alvarez) in which artists independently and collaboratively produced multiple installations that referred to the then imagined South End Arts District. Read more>>

What is MAIL ART?

Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art (but also music, sound art, poetry, etc.) through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art. The term “networking” is often used to describe Mail Art activities, based on the principles of barter and equal one-to-one collaboration.

After a peak in popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mail Art phenomenon has gradually migrated to the Internet, whose “social networks” were largely anticipated and predicted by the interactive processes of postal collaborations. Nevertheless, Mail Art is still practiced in the new Millennium by a loose global community involving thousands of “MailArtists” from the most varied backgrounds.

“Out of the reasonable assumption that the commercial gallery system is limited and perhaps corrupt, many artists emerging in the 1970s and 1980s around the world decided it would be more feasible to exhibit their work not through galleries and ancillary museums but through the postal system, especially if they lived in areas where galleries and other artists were scarce. For the production of imagery, they drew often upon xerography (photocopying) and the earlier technology of rubber stamps. They would also announce exhibitions in venues previously devoid of art, such as city halls in remote parts of the world, ideally accepting everything submitted and issuing a catalog with names, usually accompanied by addresses and selected reproductions. While such work had little impact upon commercial galleries (and the “art magazines” dependent upon galleries’ ads), one result was a thriving alternative culture, calling itself “The Eternal Network”, as intensely interested in itself as serious artists have always been.” – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some “MailArtists” claim that Mail Art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Marc Anthony in a rolled-up carpet.

Mail Art from a 2003 FLYNNDOG Exhibition “CANCELLED” >>

What is STAMP ART?

This is a good introduction if you aren’t at all familiar with the art form and possibilities!

POSTAL MODERNISM by Peter Franke
One of the lessons of the postwar art boom is: nothing is safe from the artist’s hands. In the last decade alone, artists have taken to producing their own theater, their own music, their own books, their own records, their own toys, their own maps, their own houses and their own postage stamps.

The genre of artists’ stamps should be distinguished immediately from both the regular, “legal tender” postage issues of countries and from the mail art phenomenon in which many artists have participated in the last decade. The artists’ stamps considered here are not recognized as valid by any post office although several artists have pulled fast ones and gotten their mail through with their own stamps (or with painted or drawn replicas of regular stamps).

Official issues that reproduce artworks, such as France and Italy have recently been printing, or issues designed by recognized artists, such as Robert Indiana’s 8-cent LOVE stamp; or Stuart Davis’s Fine Arts design, are only arguably artists’ stamps (although the argument is persuasive, especially with an example such as the Futurist visual poem by F. T Marinetti which Italy put on a stamp a couple of years ago). Read More>>