An artistamp or artist's stamp is 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.
Ruud Janssen is a Dutch Fluxus and mail artist currently living in Breda in the Netherlands.
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 developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s. It has since developed into a global, ongoing movement.
Shōzō Shimamoto was a Japanese artist. Having studied with Jirō Yoshihara, the future Gutai leader, from 1947, Shimamoto was a key founding member of Gutai along with Yoshihara and fifteen others in August, 1954. He was close to the leader Yoshihara and actively engaged in the early activities and group administrations. He worked with a wide variety of techniques, such as poking holes in layered newspaper, throwing bottles of paint at canvases, experimenting with film and stage performances, and composing sound art. He was particularly noted for his innovative performance art. Indeed, when Yoshihara turned to focus more on painting, upon his meeting with the French art critic Michel Tapié, Shimamoto continued to urge the leader to pursue this direction, wanting to work with Allan Kaprow, for example.
Email art refers to artwork created for the medium of email. It includes computer graphics, animations, screensavers, digital scans of artwork in other media, and even ASCII art. When exhibited, Email art can be either displayed on a computer screen or similar type of display device, or the work can be printed out and displayed.
Ryosuke Cohen is a mail artist. He was responsible for the Brain Cell mail art project, which he began in June 1985 and retains thousands of members in more than 80 countries, e.g. Hans Braumüller, Theo Breuer, Michael Leigh or Litsa Spathi. In August 2001 he began the Fractal Portrait Project. He has taught art to school children for more than 25 years.
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, also known as GAC, was an Italian artist and art collector. After his initial activity as a painter, in the 1940s and 1950s, he became one of the major collectors of contemporary Italian abstract art, developing a deep relationship of patronage and friendship with the artists. This experience has its pinnacle in the exhibition Modern painters of the Cavellini collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1957. In the 1960s Cavellini resumed his activity as an artist, with an ample production spanning from Neo-Dada to performance art to mail art, of which he became one of the prime exponents with the Exhibitions at Home and the Round Trip works. In 1971 he invented autostoricizzazione (self-historicization), upon which he acted to create a deliberate popular history surrounding his existence. He also authored the books Abstract Art (1959), Man painter (1960), Diary of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1975), Encounters/Clashes in the Jungle of Art (1977) and Life of a Genius (1989).
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.
Vittore Baroni, is an Italian mailartist, music critic and explorer of countercultures. Since the mid-1970s he has been one of the most active and respected promoters and documenters of mail art.
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.
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.
Gonzo (circus) is a Dutch-language bi-monthly culture and music magazine, first published in 1991 in Belgium. It is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The magazine primarily focuses on contemporary musical genres such as punk, industrial, hip hop, jazz, improvised music, modern classical music, indie rock, noise, electronic music and world music. The founders are Stefan Joosten and Dirk Vreys. Since 1995 each publication is accompanied by a compilation CD under the name Mind the Gap, featuring new artists.
Mark Bloch is an American conceptual artist, mail artist, performance artist, visual artist, archivist and writer whose work combines visuals and text as well as performance and media to explore ideas of long-distance communication, including across time.
Anna Aleksandrovna Tarshis, better known as Ry Nikonova or Rea Nikonova, was a Russian artist, poet, and writer. Many of her artworks are held in private and public collections throughout the world.
Ginny Lloyd is an American artist, noted for her work with mail art, photocopy art, performance art and photography. She organized the Copy Art Exhibition in San Francisco in 1980 with programming devoted to promoting xerography. Her work was included in the exhibition, From Bonnard to Baselitz: A Decade of Acquisitions by the Prints Collection 1978–1988 and listed annually since 1992 in Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
Luc Piron is a Belgian artist. He is a painter and printmaker. He is also a photographer and experiments with the possibilities of computer art.
Carlo Pittore born Charles J. Stanley was an American painter, educator, art activist, and publisher, whose primary study, teaching and body of work was figurative art and portrait painting. He was a pioneer in the Mail Art movement, and is noted for opening the first independent art gallery in the East Village, Manhattan. In 1987, Pittore founded "The Academy of Carlo Pittore" in Bowdoinham, Maine. He died of cancer in 2005.
Umbrella was an art newsletter or informal magazine that ran for three decades, from 1978 to 2008. Its focus was on artist's books and related media, and it has been credited as an important factor in the emergence and visibility of artist's books from Southern California.
Chuck Welch, also known as the CrackerJack Kid or Jack Kid, was born in Kearney, Nebraska in 1948. He wrote "Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology", with a foreword by Ken Friedman, which was published and edited by University of Calgary Press in 1995. The Eternal Network and the Crackerjack Kid were mentioned in a review of mail art titled "Pushing the Envelope" in 2001, and the archivist and curator Judith Hoffberg wrote about him in her publication Umbrella. His awards include a Fulbright Grant and NEA Hilda Maehling Fellowship.
R. Kalynn Campbell Jr, is an American artist, illustrator, cartoonist and writer/poet. He is best known for his work in the Lowbrow/Kustom Kulture movement, wherein he has been referred to as 'one of the most influential of the California Lowbrow artists'. As an illustrator, he created album/CD covers for notable bands like Megadeth, Reverend Horton Heat, and Social Distortion. His political cartoons were a fixture in Paul Krassner's 'The Realist' magazine from 1985 to 2001.
