I’ve Ripened to the Genius of George Maciunas By John Held, Jr. I’ve ripened to the genius of George Maciunas. It wasn’t easy “getting him” as a young artist. I aged into him. In the process of learning about art, with each new level of understanding attained, I drew closer to a place where Maciunas […]

The Treatment of Vision: Arman’s Cachets Introduction The cachets of Arman, his self-described rubber stamp works from the mid-to-late fifties, have been regarded by art critics and historians as necessary first steps in his coming of age as an artist; an awakening fascination with commonplace objects that deepened as the artist’s career progressed. It has […]

Before Punk and Zines: Bay Area Dada by John Held, Jr. Buying art is usually a straight forward proposition. You go to a gallery or artists’ studio, decide on a piece of work you like, and negotiate a price. Monte Cazazza had something different in mind when he conceptualized his 1974 work, One Thousand Dollar […]

Bunny Dead: The Mysterious Life and Death of Ray Johnson and the Rise of the New York Correspondance School of Art On January 13, 1995, Ray Johnson, the founding father of Mail Art, died under mysterious circumstances rivaling the enigmatic way in which he conducted his life. He was 67 years old, and leaves behind a […]

The Caustic Jelly Post Portraits of buZ blurr In the April 13, 1972, issue of Rolling Stone, then one of the most popular and influential youth culture American magazines, an article on mail art first appeared in a mass circulation journal. Written by Thomas Albright, the art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, this “new […]

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini(1914-1990-2014) There is no artist in modern times, perhaps in all of time, who tried to insure (some would say purchase) his place in art history with the intensity of the Italian artist Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. His art of “self-historification” was based on the premise that no one knew the artist better than […]

Jas. W. Felter:Artistamp Activist Born near the foothills of New York States’ Catskill Mountains in 1943, James Felter was introduced to painting by his grandmother and encouraged to collect postage stamps by his father. These two childhood activities were to portend a future direction, not only culminating in the personal discovery of a new artistic […]

The Formidable Blue Stamp of  Yves Klein by John Held, Jr. My intention is to trace the history of one of the first examples of a postage stamp created by an artist, but the fact that the stamp was created by Yves Klein, a French painter and conceptualist, makes this no easy task. He is […]

Learning from Friedman Ken Friedman’s Rubber Stamp Activity. John Held, Jr. Ken Friedman (American, 1949- ) was an important connection between Fluxus, Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School of Art, and the emerging amalgam of seventies networking artists gathered through the postal system and collaboratively exploring the aesthetics of communication on an international scale. The […]

May Wilson: Grandmother to the Avant-Garde by John Held, Jr. In 1995, on the 90th anniversary of her birth, the Baltimore Museum of Art held a May Wilson exhibition commemorating her life as an artist. It was a belated homecoming for this artist who left the area for New York City in her sixties to pursue […]

Notes Toward a History of Artistamps John Held, Jr. The first exhibition of artist postage stamps occurred in 1974, when James Warren Felter first identified the field in an exhibition at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The exhibition subsequently traveled to additional sites in Geneva, Switzerland, and around the United States and Canada, […]

Illogical as an Instructive Process: an Interview with Ray Johnson The interview took place on December 2, 1977, at the Mid-York Library System, Utica, New York, the day following Ray Johnson’s performance of,Barry White Ecstasy, at the Root Art Center, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, where his work was on display. John Held, Jr: Do […]

Robert Watts: The Complete Postage Stamp Sheets, 1961-1986 by John Held, Jr. There can be considerable argument on who created the first artist postage stamp. The Dada artist Raoul Hausmann, associated with the Berlin Dada group, affixed a self-portrait postage stamp to a postcard in 1919. Yves Klein, the French Nouveaux Réaliste painter and conceptualist, […]

The TAM Rubberstamp- Archive of Ruud Janssen by John Held, Jr. It has been sixteen years since Ruud Janssen became aware of mail art, and because of his interest in documentation, we have an excellent overview of his activities. In this catalog we have reprinted both his lengthy Curriculum Vitae, and his latest “information-newsletter” of […]