The Mail Art Project 2025 is now open for registration for IA member organizations. Everyone is invited to participate in this collective creative activity!
Mail art, or correspondence art, traditionally has been a way to create and send small-scale works of art through the mail. A variety of media can be used in mail art including: paper, postcards, found or recycled images and objects, stamps, paint, photographs, music, poetry, or anything else you have at hand.
This year, we encourage you to incorporate natural found materials – leaves, seeds, roots, bark, branches, dirt, soil, petals, acorns, grasses, moss, mud, pinecones, fruit, sand, shells, and any other natural materials you may have access to.
Please read below to get started, and don’t forget to register by February 21, 2025. Thank you for choosing to participate in this year’s Mail Art Project!
Mail Art Project 2025
Instructions for Participating
This year we invite participants to find grounding and inspiration from the natural world in their creative artmaking practices. In times of overwhelm, a simple way to bring awareness back to the here and now is to use the senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) as a way to reconnect with the corporeal body. How might the natural treasures that exist in the margins of your local neighborhood trails and parks become the center of your attention, intention, and creative process?
We invite you to use whatever materials you prefer, in addition to the art supplies and materials included in the kit, to create artwork inspired by the theme and prompt below. Art kits will be mailed shortly so please keep an eye out for those.
We encourage you to reflect on the following questions as you head out to forage for materials for your project:
• How can we use natural and found materials to connect with and make visible, in new ways, the relations between place, land, and embodiment?
• How do our bodies extend beyond their skin? How does place become part of our touching, feeling self?
2025 Timeline
- Jan 16 – Feb 21: Registration open
- Feb 24 – 28: Mail art project kits sent out via mail
- Mar 1 – May 2: Creative artmaking
- May 2: Deadline to submit photo, description, and any reflections to IA
- Summer 2025: Mail Art Project public digital display viewable on the IA website
Registration
Interested in participating? Register here before February 21, 2025.
Mail Art Project Archive
- View the Mail Art Project 2023-24 Submissions, “Radical Reckoning: Invoking the Elements for Collective Change“
- View the Mail Art Project 2022-23 Submissions, “Rituals of Repair and Renewal“
- View the Mail Art Project 2021-22 Submissions, “Water Ways and Movements“
Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
