Photos from the Mail Art Show

The Exhibition Initiative recently curated “The Mail Art Show,” a selection of works from the thousands available in the Oberlin College Library Mail Art Collection housed in the Art Library. Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and reached its peak of popularity in the 80s. It involves sending visual art through the international postal system in an effort to create a network of artists.  Below are some photographs from the opening November 12th.

 

Here are a couple photos from the event.

 

Eight of the fourteen curators who created The Mail Art Show.

 

 

 

The Art of Letterpress survives in this Digital Age

A Letterpress Shop Survives, Printing Poems in

the Era of YouTube

By Lawrence Biemiller

So to come upon a place like Naropa University, where poetry is written and read and listened to and discussed, is a delight. And then to get a tour of Naropa’s Harry Smith Print Shop, where verse is lovingly printed—with old metal type and antique presses, yet—well, it’s both Disneyland and Dollywood for dactyl addicts, an enchanted kingdom of fonts and figures. I could gladly have spent hours pulling out drawers of type (Caslon, Garamond, Perpetua, Valiant, Van Dijk), leafing through chapbooks and broadsides, poking among ornaments. Everywhere I looked something caught my eye—poems tacked to the walls, pica rulers, paper cutters, Celtic capitals.

To read the rest of the article visit: http://chronicle.com/blogs/postcards/a-letterpress-shop-survives-printing-poems-in-the-era-of-youtube/654?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

 

Did you know that Oberlin has a letterpress studio too? Check it out, 2nd Floor of Mudd Library!