Tuesday, 25 February 2020 at 4:30 pm – Tuesday, 25 February 2020 at 7:30 pm

John Held, Jr on Mail Art

Date: Tuesday 25th February 2020

Time: 4.30pm - 7.30pm

Location: Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections

3rd floor, All Saints Library Library

Manchester

M15 6BH

Tickets: Free - Available on Eventbrite

John Held, Jr. is one of the most prominent and respected chroniclers of Mail Art and the author of many books and essays on the subject.

Asked about artists of the future seeking an alternative to the marketplace, Marcel Duchamp replied, “They will go underground.” His prediction has been born out by an international network of Mail Artists, who have built a system of non-commercial art exchange over a five decade history. Mail Art is becoming to be seen as a harbinger of the Internet, linking a global network of participants in a multicultural open system of free exchange. Instead of juried shows pitting artists in competition with one another, Mail Artists work in cooperation over geographical, political and social boundaries, encouraging all to participate. Those who have been actively involved for many years, like Hazel Jones and Michael Leigh, have accumulated substantial archives, which have achieved increasing cultural significance. As Mail Artists grow older, the need for preservation of these materials inside the confines of traditional cultural institutions becomes crucial in judging their impact on society and the world of art. This talk by John Held, Jr. examines the ways in which these archives are being incorporated into museums and libraries throughout the world, enabling scholars to bring this underground medium and movement to light.

4.30pm Event opens. Opportunity to view the Curious Things exhibition in the gallery.

5.00pm-6.00pm Talk by John Held, Jr. in the lecture theatre.

6.00pm-7.00pm Opportunity to view the Curious Things exhibition in the gallery.

7.00pm Event closes.

From 3.00pm-4.00pm, there will be a free rubber stamping and collage workshop, led by Mail Artist Hazel Jones, in our teaching space. No booking required, just drop-in.

San Francisco based “artist/activist/archivist” John Held, Jr. has authored Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography (1991), Rubber Stamp Art (1999), Small Scale Subversion: Mail Art and Artistamps (2015) and most recently Archiving Challenging Art (2020). He has contributed to the Dictionary of Art (Grove, 2000) and At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (MIT, 2005); lectured at the V&A Museum, London and the Museum of Communications in Berlin; and organized exhibitions at the National Palace of Fine Arts, Havana and the Mayakovsky State Museum, Moscow. Works from his Mail Art collection are held in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and his personal papers are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. In 2019, over eighty of his works were included in the exhibition snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

RAH! - Research in Arts and Humanities