Mail Art

The Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo has long recognized the materiality of language and that art's progression is a fact of an individual creating in and for a community of artists.

Mail Art is an example of such an ensemble of individual artists, musicians and poets harvesting the stuff, opinions, emotions, pop-culture icons and the like of our daily living in order to bring it all into art, art that goes contrary to conservative notions and is given away. It is a grand collage created by a community that began with Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School more than 40 years ago.

Mail Art is more than just image-bearing mail passing along in the governmental stream. It is a person-to-person attempt to redefine our cultural heritage -- the very way we see and think and feel about the world around us. It represents a new way of relating to one another and creating our own culture, by minimizing the aesthetic and material trappings of the market economy...working with, and when necessary, against the grain of both popular and high culture... maximizing our collective human souls. --The Sticker Dude

The Poetry Collection has several Mail Art Collections that are representative of this progressive form of art, as well as a wealth of associative material and mail art pieces, among them original Ray Johnson collages and his publications.

For more information on Mail Art, please contact The Poetry Collection.