In this essay, Jennifer Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, MoMA Library looks at the history of MoMA through the direct engagement of the artist. This research was presented in her exhibition Messing With MoMA: Critical Interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, 1939–Now (July 1–November 29, 2015), which documented seven decades of interventions by artists, the general public,…
“Would you have participated in this activity if it was truly revolutionary?” The Poema Colectivo 2014 project invited a group of artists from Mexico to create a new “collective poem” for today based on the 1981 project Poema Colectivo Revolución. Each invited artist was asked to nominate another friend to join the project. With many thanks…
In this short essay on the writings of the Argentine experimental artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Vanessa Davidson, Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, explores how the artist positioned his mail art practice in three key texts. post has commissioned translations of these texts, now newly available in English. Edgardo…
El arte correo, sabemos, es una excusa, a nosotros nos interesan cosas más importantes y que tienen que ver con nosotros mismos, nuestras familias, nuestros pueblos. Si aceptamos esto, las diferencias se diluyen; después de tanto drama y tanta sangre tenemos que discernir quiénes son nuestros verdaderos enemigos. Clemente Padín, Carta a Mauricio GuerreroMontevideo > México…
Mail art, we know, is an excuse, we are interested in more important things that have to do with ourselves, our families, our people. If we accept this, differences are dissolved; after so much drama and so much blood we must discern who our true enemies are. —Clemente Padín, letter to Mauricio Guerrero, January 8,…
“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970. In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception. “Let’s convert all systems into poetry”…
Curator Mauricio Marcin sketches a brief history of mail art, as told through a variety of archives in Mexico City, arguing that these remnants demand that we “keep on thinking.” This essay is an adapted and translated version of the article “Arte Correo en un Libro,” originally published in Mauricio Marcin (ed.), Artecorreo (Mexico City: Museo de…
El curador Mauricio Marcin esboza una breve historia del arte correo, a partir de diversos archivos ubicados en la Ciudad de México, argumentando que los remanentes del arte correo nos obligan a “seguir pensando”. Este ensayo es una versión adaptada y traducida del texto “Arte Correo en un Libro”, publicado originalmente en Mauricio Marcin (ed.), Artecorreo (Ciudad…
Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg ruminates on the life journeys of his archive, weaving a tale that takes in personal, cultural, socioeconomic, and institutional dimensions of building—and letting go of—an artist’s file, and considering whether an archive can itself be a work of art. To most people, a file is merely a collection of objects, mostly…
