The collection of works came first from a call to participate in a Mail Art project “Reinvention.” The curator, Jason Brown, asked for works on a global and local scale with the theme of “Reinvention.” Brown’s project outline stated that his blog would display the received mail art, which the works would eventually go on exhibition in Nashville, Tennessee, and it gave no inhibitions. The technique of art was “free,” meaning, not limited to any media and the size was “free,” expressing no limitations on what could be mailed. Moreover, there would be no jury selection, no mail art returned, and no sales of the objects sent. Brown cataloged the pieces, the project outline, news releases and other documentation of the project, and its exhibition history on his blog: link

The call for mail art was in February 2014 and the 460 pieces from 31 countries were received until mid-August of that year. The scope of the project is quite limited then, between February and August 2014.

The contents are extremely varied due to the “free” project guidelines. The pieces are all considered Mail Art, but otherwise they are made of different material, reused objects, and other miscellaneous forms. The curator organized the documents in the order he received them, grouping them into “pages.” He published the entire series in these pages on his blog. The Vanderbilt Special Collections housing will keep the integrity of the series order, but will sort them by box order rather than “page” groupings. The website’s documentation of the pieces designates what is considered the piece of art with parenthetical descriptions after the artist’s name or other pertinent information. In order to match this online catalog, the artist’s name, any parenthetical citations, and the artist’s location are included in the container list. Any oversize material is denoted in the original order by an “oversize” page. The oversize boxes keep the original order of the pieces within each box, but the boxes themselves are sorted by size rather than content.

The second mail art project “Letter to Me” was donated to Special Collections in August 2015, and the inclusive dates for this second mail art project were January 20, 2015 – July 1, 2015.

This project features the letters of approximately 200 participants from 26 countries, and several languages are represented.

Brown encouraged the participants to use present, past and future tenses for their art letters.