Arts & Letters

      Perish the thought that art should be encased in glass and kept in a museum that charges admission for people to view it.
      With mail art, the more handled and smudged it gets, the better.
      The term "mail art" is intended to be self-explanatory. Mail art is any decorative item sent through the postal system -- as long as the art object is not boxed or wrapped or hidden from view.
      If a letter is sent in an artistic envelope, what the public can see and touch -- the envelope -- is the mail art.
      But mail art isn't always flat paper. Stuffed animals, shoes, paper plates, gourds and plastic fish have also been decorated by mail artists and delivered, as is, by the post office.
      "Part of (mail art) is the postmark, the cancellation," explains Anne Engelhardt. She owns an Albuquerque, N.M., paper store and teaches bookbinding. She also manned an art-papers booth at a recent Las Vegas trade show for the crafts industry.
      "It's an anti-art movement," Engelhardt says, because mail art goes against the notion that art must be expensive, elitist, rare.
      Las Vegan Audrey Freedman sends, and receives, mail art.
      She has a friend who loves shoes. So once, Freedman sent her a single black, glossy, spiked high-heel shoe. Freedman decorated it with neon colors, a bit of glitter, then put the address and postage on the shoe's sole. It arrived safe and sound.
      "It's real fun, trying to see what can go through the mail," Freedman admits. She and her husband, Jimm, own and run Stamp Oasis, a local shop that sells rubber stamps and other art supplies. The store keeps a scrapbook of elaborate flat envelopes it has sent, some by customers placing a mundane mail order.
      During a phase before the Freedmans' toddler son was born, Jimm used to deride Barney, a popular dinosaur character on children's television. Friends got wind of Jimm's aversion and started anonymously sending him Barney-themed pieces of mail art -- including a Barney-shaped bank containing coins and a soft plush Barney.
      One Halloween, the Freedmans received a giant wooden piece of candy corn as a holiday greeting, stamped and canceled.
      "It makes the (recipient) feel special." That's how Audrey Freedman explains the motivation for sending mail art.
      But there's also a sense that mail art entertains people along the way, "from the postman who picks it up, the people who process it, to the postman who delivers it," Freedman adds.
      New Mexico calligrapher Kathy Chilton has evidence that her mail art has touched people while en route.
      One Halloween, she drew a face on a number of small, hard pumpkins that are actually gourds. She addressed them, and sent them off to family and friends. When Chilton's daughter received hers, she reported that it had arrived with two faces. "Someone in the post office along the way had added a face," Chilton theorizes.
      "This week, I got a shell from the South Pacific with a tag on it," she continues. "Frisbees, those go really well (through the mail)."
      Chilton likes to send out "progressive" mail art, such as her picnic project. In one mailing she sent out decorated paper plates to friends. The next step, she sent clear plastic cases that included a red-checked napkin, plastic silverware and a few plastic ants. In subsequent installments, she sent ingredients of Southwestern cuisine including hard bricks of cheese and canned salsa and chilies.
      Chilton sees mail art as a natural outgrowth of calligraphy. People who take the time to compose letters that are visually beautiful or interesting started doing the same with their envelopes. From conventional flat envelopes, mail art has evolved to include other objects.
      Despite the reputation that postal employees are humorless bureaucrats, the ones who hand-cancel Chilton's mailings tend to be friendly and helpful. To thank them, she once brought a bouquet of flowers to the post-office counter. "The fellow said, `You want a meter stamp on that?' " she remembers.
      To Chilton, the informal philosophy of mail art is "to bring art to the ordinary. It makes the mailbox the gallery."
      Even formal bodies such as the prestigious Smithsonian Institution are acknowledging the existence of mail art. This year, the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum added a category for mail art to its annual contest for mail calligraphy.
      "Pushing the Envelope" was the new category for submissions of creative handmade envelopes. One contest rule said, "Inventive relationships between the postage stamp and the envelope design are encouraged."
      The National Postal Museum will display winning entries in an exhibit that opens in May.