My BFA project is pretty straightforward, so I really did not have any questions about my topic, besides my initial question of why snail mail is becoming popular again. My first article Newsweek's "Why Gen Z Is Bringing Back Snail Mail" answers that question right away, stating that, "It's a way to connect on a more intimate level". In a mostly digital age, most of our connections and interactions with people are almost all through online spaces. Although we are still communicating with people on a somewhat genuine way that intimate level of sitting down and writing a letter is gone. But this action of letter writing and sending is making a comeback. People are starting to realize the importance of this older form of communication: mail. In Reader's "Chicago's Mail Art Renaissance" the article focus more on mail art and the mail art scene in Chicago, interviewing many owners of mail art clubs and asking them about their business, inspirations, and why they made a mail art club. Many say that it was a way to unite people and share their love of art.
Mail art is just small art pieces that are sent through mail which can include, postcards, stickers, letters, and or random artsy trinkets. Creating a monthly mail art club is what I want to make for my BFA project. Creating a whole brand with its website as well as the actual mail. Since it would be a monthly subscription, I want to show off what multiple months of these envelops would like. Each monthly envelope would have its own theme and different goodies included.
Why Gen Z Is Bringing Back Snail Mail - Newsweek
Snail mail is the 1 thing Millennials, Gen-Zers agree on: 'Lost art'
Have you looked into the history of Mail Art? https://www.printedmatter.org/mail-art/
ReplyDelete"Although its origins can be traced back to the Dadaists and Italian Futurists, New York artist Ray Johnson is considered by many as the founder of contemporary mail art. In the 1950s, he began sending out small-scale collages he called “moticos,” some of which included simple instructions for the recipient. The mail was often meant to be sent back, or forwarded to another person, creating effective chains of artistic correspondence.
Mail art proved to be successful in countering existing institutions and galleries. Artists began corresponding with each other, disseminating their art, and creating notoriety through this unconventional method. Thus, due to its explicitly populist and anti-commercial tenants, mail art found a place within the countercultural art movements of the 1960s and 1970s."