Mail Art Takes On the World

When collecting the mail, there’s almost nothing more joyful than seeing a friend’s postcard among the bills and advertisements.

But imagine getting a scene of Lima, Peru, that, instead of showing off its coastline or primary cathedral, portrays the city as desolate and eerie. This view shows an abandoned building—covered in graffiti, with unevenly chipped plaster and exposed bricks underneath—tapering into the gap left by a fork in the road.

The image comes from Gilda Mantilla’s series, Lima, Peru (2003), in which she shied away from touristy clichés in favor of the underappreciated and overlooked corners of her city. Mantilla’s postcards are just one of many iterations of mail art, a mode of creative production that uses the postal system as its medium. In addition to more conventional pieces, like letters and postcards, mail art might take the form of artist-made stamps (known as artist stamps), visual poetry, handmade and photocopied publications, custom rubber stamps, or bureaucratic stickers. The works circulate through the mail, building international networks of makers around the globe.

Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s–2020s at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside takes a look at the Latinx and Latin American women who used mail art to express their creativity, push against gendered expectations, and bypass oppressive regimes’ surveillance. Cocurators Zanna Gilbert and Elena Shtromberg draw a line from pre-Internet time, when physical letters were plentiful, to the modern era of automated shipping and logistics, showing that the strategies and tactics of mail art endure even as technology changes.

“Not only are the women transgressing their gender identities and gender expectations, the category [of mail art] itself can’t be circumscribed,” Shtromberg says. “It inevitably transgresses styles and national borders.”

The exhibition features objects from collections around the world, but the main body of work is on loan from the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections. This repository has strong research materials relating to the art and cultural histories of Latin America from the colonial period to the present day.

Uncovering women’s messages

While mail art is inherently an accessible, low-cost medium that needn’t gravitate toward any particular demographic, historically the genre has been defined by male artists.

“I was very attracted to the idea of mail art, because of its democratic principles, but we realized that there hadn’t really been attention to the history of women’s contributions,” Gilbert says. She and Shtromberg set out to rectify that with Transgresoras.

The curators demonstrate the gender imbalance by showcasing a portrait exchange project from COMMONPRESS, a mail art magazine that kept the artist network connected. For issue 15 (1979), the publication invited subscribers to submit a self-portrait carved from a rubber stamp. The exchange attracted 57 participants, but only four women: Anna Banana, Hetty Huisman, Karin Lambrecht, and Graciela Gutiérrez Marx.

Handmade publications and visual poetry

Marx, an Argentinian artist and feminist, was a particularly notable figure in the mail art movement. Throughout Transgresoras, her name appears in numerous projects that explore women’s rights and identity. She has many series dedicated to her mother, whom she called Mamablanca, a name that is also an allusion to Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who wore white scarves to signify that their children had disappeared under Argentina’s authoritarian leadership. In Grupo de familia–Reconstrucción de un mito (Family Group–Assembling a Myth) (1979), Marx provided artists with a blank postcard and invited them to send it back with a portrait and message for her mother’s 75th birthday. This was a way of expanding the “family” and showing her elderly mother the impact of long-distance communication.

A Mamablanca envelope on display in Transgresoras is handstamped with red, cartoony hands paired with the word aqui (here), pointing to where the message should go. In this one, an artist drew his portrait. A bald man with glasses and a brown beard smiles in front of a beach scene, flanked by two palm trees. Marx would later assemble all these contributions into a photo album, which she called Los códices marginales de Mamablanca (The Marginal Codices of Mamablanca).

“The reason for showing this kind of work is for an emphasis on collaborative projects, of making work in concert with others, and the DIY nature of the way that things are made,” Gilbert says. “It emphasizes circulation and movement and distribution of messages, rather than a discrete object that could be collected and put in a museum.”

Mail art also emerged from an art form called visual poetry, which chopped and rearranged language, turning text into abstract images instead of legible messages. Makers like Mirtha Dermisache pushed the boundaries of visual poetry with their asemic writing. In her trio of letters, all untitled, her designs first resemble written languages, but a closer look reveals that the scribbles amount to nothing intelligible.

This type of play helped mail artists realize that they could bend language not just visually but also physically and emotionally through paper types, mailing materials, and the system’s infrastructure. The photographs from Poema (Poem) (1979) depict Lenora de Barros licking a typewriter. One picture shows her tongue grossly trapped in the typebars, uncomfortably giving a new meaning to the phrase “tongue-tied.” De Barros lived in Brazil during a military dictatorship and used these images to critique the aggressive censorship of artists. The photos were reproduced and distributed as part of a traveling exhibition of “portable poems” called Zero à Esquerda (Zero Left), a box of artworks sent to viewers by mail.

Resistance gets a postmark

De Barros wasn’t the only Latin American artist to use mail art to draw attention to political repression and censorship. Between the 1960s and early 1990s, many countries in Central and South America were ruled by extreme right-wing dictatorships. Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are among the countries that disappeared—killed or tortured—dissenting citizens, banned the free press, limited artistic expression, and implemented regressive economic policies.

“In many ways, mail art allowed artists to evade the strict censorship measures that were pervasive in other forms of expression because it was hidden, it was quirky, and it wasn’t immediately legible,” Shtromberg says.

Virginia Errázuriz used her series Cancelados (Canceled) (1979) to bring attention to those who disappeared under Chile’s dictatorship (1973–90). She utilized a photocopier to layer images of missing persons with pieces of burlap and electrical wire, simple materials interrogators used to hood and torture their prisoners. She finished off these grainy compositions with a bureaucratic, bright red stamp that read Cancelado, indicating that these people’s lives had likely ended. The artworks were mailed out in plain, brown envelopes, ideally unnoticed by the military regime.

The art form’s international reach also gave anti-war protesters an opportunity to show solidarity with their peers. Poema Colectivo: Revolución (Collective Poem: Revolution) (1981–83) was a mail art exhibition organized by Colectivo-3, a Mexican art collective that sympathized with the 1979 Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua. The collective provided a letter-sized template that hundreds of people from 43 countries filled out to depict their idea of revolution.

From snail mail to email

Eventually these regimes fell, and mail artists started looking toward technological advancement and what it might mean for their medium. Thanks to services like AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail, email gained widespread popularity in the 1990s, and many people shifted from letter writing to electronic correspondence.

Still, the techniques from mail art continued to inspire contemporary artists. In her series Joy in Paperwork: The Archive (2016), Amalia Pica used rubber stamps to design intricate, abstract compositions, which also helped her process her own difficulties with navigating immigration paperwork. The markers from immigration offices, passport applications, and notaries stack like mountains, curve around checkboxes, and overlap into snakelike patterns. The contemporary stamps, which feature @ symbols, the term “e-mail,” and date counters that dial into the 2020s show that, even in the digital age, physical paperwork proliferates.

Other artists have examined how mail has become linked to environmental waste and overconsumption. Clarissa Tossin observes that nowadays, one is more likely to receive a brown box from Amazon than a letter from a friend. In The Amazon River from Space (ISS/NASA) (2025) she used black ink to paint the Amazon River across a canvas of an Amazon envelope, with shipping labels peeking out from underneath the darkened tributaries.

Mail art’s ability to impact a global audience is also echoed in Beatriz Cortez’s work No Cages No Jaulas (2020). The phrase appeared as skywriting above the Los Angeles Immigration Court during a multicity action called “In Plain Sight,” which was conceived by Cassils and rafa esparza. Cortez was among 80 artists protesting President Trump’s escalation of DHS and ICE enforcement, which now repeats the same patterns of intimidation, violence, and kidnapping used by armed militias during the Central and South American dictatorships. Cortez published documentation of the skywriting as a postcard and invited recipients to collaborate on the artwork by embroidering the message, with the puffy clouds as a guide.

Even though getting a personal letter or postcard is becoming rarer, it just means that receiving that handmade note from a friend is even more special. Taking inspiration from the radical artists in Transgresoras, it may be time to craft your own piece of mail art and become a link in the chain letter going around the globe.

Transgresoras is on view at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside until February 15.