The term artistamp or artist's stamp refers to a postage stamp-like art form used to depict or commemorate any subject its creator chooses. Artistamps are a form of Cinderella stamps in that they are not valid for postage, but they differ from forgeries or bogus Illegal stamps in that typically the creator has no intent to defraud postal authorities or stamp collectors.
Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s, though it has since developed into a global movement that continues to the present.
Xerox art is an art form that began in the 1960s. Prints are created by putting objects on the glass, or platen, of a copying machine and by pressing "start" to produce an image. If the object is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, or the object is moved, the resulting image is distorted in some way. The curvature of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, and the distance of the cover from the glass, all affect the final image. Often, with proper manipulation, rather ghostly images can be made. Basic techniques include: Direct Imaging, the copying of items placed on the platen ; Still Life Collage, a variation of direct imaging with items placed on the platen in a collage format focused on what is in the foreground/background; Overprinting, the technique of constructing layers of information, one over the previous, by printing onto the same sheet of paper more than once; Copy Overlay, a technique of working with or interfering in the color separation mechanism of a color copier; Colorizing, vary color density and hue by adjusting the exposure and color balance controls; Degeneration is a copy of a copy degrading the image as successive copies are made; Copy Motion, the creation of effects by moving an item or image on the platen during the scanning process. Each machine also creates different effects.
Artists' books are works of art that utilize the form of the book. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects.
Judith Hoffberg was a librarian, archivist, lecturer, a curator and art writer, and editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter on artist's books, mail art, and Fluxus art.
Squeak Carnwath is a contemporary American painter and arts educator. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at University of California, Berkeley.
Silvia Poloto is an artist born in São Paulo, Brazil who immigrated to San Francisco, California, in 1992. She earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from University of São Paulo. She earned her M.B.A. at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo. From 1996 to 1999, she worked as an instructor's assistant in the Sculpture Department, City College of San Francisco. During that period, she also worked as a welder at 3D Studios in Oakland and art instructor in mixed media at the Associated Students of the University of California Art Studio at the University of California, Berkeley.
She works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, and painting, and she also creates video art. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including the United Arab Emirates, France, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and China, among others. In the San Francisco Bay Area, her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the SFMOMA Artist's Gallery, the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, the Italian American Museum, and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, where she was an artist-in-residence in 2001. Poloto's work has been acquired by more than 50 institutional and corporate collections around the US and by more than 800 private collectors around the world.
Artpool Art Research Center is an archive, research space, specialist and media library in Budapest, Hungary, dedicated to international contemporary and avant-garde arts, such as Artist's books, artistamp, mail art, visual poetry, sound poetry, conceptual art, fluxus, installation, performance.
John Held Jr. , is an American mailartist, author and performance artist who has been an active participant in alternative art since 1975, particularly in the fields of rubber stamp art, zine culture, and artistamps. He is one of the most prominent and respected promoters and chroniclers of mail art.
Endre Tot born in Sümeg, Hungary, 1937 is a Hungarian artist who lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
Guy Bleus is a Belgian artist, archivist and writer. He is associated with olfactory art, visual poetry, performance art and the mail art movement.
Anna Banana is a Canadian artist known for her performance art, writing, and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an "entrepreneur and critic", and pioneered the artistamp, a postage-stamp-sized medium. She has been prominent in the mail art movement since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement's early history and its second generation. As a publisher, Banana launched Vile magazine and the "Banana Rag" newsletter; the latter became Artistamp News in 1996.
Cindy Bernard is a Los-Angeles based artist whose artistic practice comprises photography, video, performance, and activism. In 2002, Cindy Bernard founded the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound, which presents site-relational experimental music. Her numerous Hitchcock references have been discussed in Dan Auiler's Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998), essays by Douglas Cunningham and Christine Spengler in The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage and Commemoration (2012) and Spengler's Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014).
Davi Det Hompson (1939–1996), also known as David E. Thompson, born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and raised in Warren, Ohio, was a Fluxus book artist, concrete poet, creator of mail art, sculptor and painter living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Hompson's chosen professional name was a nom d'art for David E. Thompson and a transposition of the letters of his name.
Elyn Zimmerman is an American sculptor known for her emphasis on large scale, site specific projects and environmental art. Along with these works, Zimmerman has exhibited drawings and photographs since graduating with an MFA in painting and photography at University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. Her teachers included Robert Heineken, Robert Irwin, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Holly Roberts is an American visual artist known best for her combination of photography and paint. “Holly Roberts caused a stir in the fine art photography world of the eighties by fusing painting and photography, painting directly onto photographs”. Roberts lives and works in Corrales, New Mexico. Her work is in the permanent collection of several museums in the United States.
Rebeca Bollinger is an American artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, video, photography, drawing, installation and performance. Her work employs unconventional materials and processes through which she aggregates, fragments, re-translates or juxtaposes images and objects, in order to examine shifts in meaning, information and memory. She began her art career amid cultural shifts in the 1990s, and her work of that time engages the effects of the early internet on image production and display, systems of ordering, and the construction of identity. Her later work shifted in emphasis from images to objects, employing similar processes to give form to invisible forces, memories, ephemeral phenomena, and open-ended narratives. Bollinger has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), de Young Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art. Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and belongs to the public art collections of SFMOMA, de Young Museum, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others.
Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.
Michael Bidner (1944-1989) was a Canadian graphic artist and painter noted for his use of xerox and microfilm technology. He was from London, Ontario.
