An Alberta art gallery wants your most creative Mail Art for a project that celebrates Canada’s 150th Anniversary. Dreaming of Canada  is calling on artists, designers, illustrators, and the artistically inclined to mail in small scale art to be used in an exhibit showing later this year. 

The Art Gallery of St. Albert gives lots of leeway in how you interpret the theme: “Share your aspirations or hopes, contemplate the potential of our nation’s future or delve into your subconscious and create something fantastic.” Mail art can be an envelope, a trading or post card, mixed media or drawn or painted.

You’ve probably heard about mail art, a movement that began in the 1960s, when artists sent postcards inscribed with poems or drawings by post rather than exhibiting or selling them through conventional commercial channels. Since then, it’s become a wildly popular art form.

An online search will produce hundreds of sites.  That’s Helene Lacelle (above) doing a mail art info session in Ottawa on behalf of GOOP, a Canadian online mail art gallery.

Need some inspiration?  Here are some inspired mail art examples from Art in the Post, just one of many sites you’ll find online.