Participatory, democratic, and unique, Mail Art is exchanged via the postal service, and facilitates creative connections among artists across the world. This art form arose as a way to work outside of “official” art distribution systems and over the decades amassed a loyal and productive network of participants.
In order to discover connections between the artists who sent and received this art form, I analyzed digitized collections of Mail Art from three digital collections in. Using web-scraped metadata, I compiled statistics on the most prolific participants, and created a network visualization of senders and recipients.
Nicole is graduating with her MLIS this May, and holds a BA in Art History from Grinnell College. She is one of the managing archivists at Franklin Furnace Archive, where she works with the artists' books collection and artists' files. Her research interests include arts ephemera, fashion history, and the book as art, and she hopes to facilitate access to this information through outreach, digitization, and metadata management.