To Have and to Hold

Joanna Quigley forgoes technology in favor of something more tangible.

by Aaron Moselle

Jeff Fusco REMAINS TO BE ZINE: Quigley's latest project, available on Etsy, is inspired by her Mail Art Collective days.

Inspiration came early for Joanna Quigley. When she was 8 years old, her father, a Bryn Mawr postman, took her in for Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and she helped sort the m

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"This one letter got into my hands and it had this magazine rip-out of this woman's fishnet stocking ad, and then it had all this art all over it. I asked my dad, 'Can you send stuff like this in the mail?' He said, 'Of course. As long as it has a stamp.'"

Quigley, now 24, has always carried that revelation with her. In 2007, the West Philly resident launched the Mail Art Collective (MAC), a homespun social network for artists — local and global — to meet and communicate via artwork through the mail. Quigley considers it an idea 16 years in the making. 

Shortly after shadowing her father that summer of 1994, Quigley began creating mail art of her own, first sending it to her best friend, who had moved away to Alabama. Yet as her creative bent grew over the years, so, too, did the extravagant envelopes adorned with collages and drawings that poured out of her Havertown home.

The Internet and its countless artist Web sites were only fuel to her crafty fire; Quigley expanded the scope of her exchanges from people she'd met face to face to pen-palling with artists from across the country. "The idea of sending a surprise in the mail to someone I've never met before, or an old friend I haven't seen in a long time, is so exciting," she says. 

Quigley also wanted a way for artists to meet other artists; and so, two days before graduating from the Tyler School of Art in 2007, the printmaking major created a blog for the Mail Art Collective and got to work. The idea behind MAC, essentially, was to create an open forum where artists create and send art to each other via the U.S. Postal Service, free of charge — except for the stamp.

Quigley set loose themes, like "Childhood," "Costume/Disguise" and "Where You Live," although she points out that participants were never required to follow them. "The theme was just to get people's brains ticking," she says.

Over the next 18 months, Quigley organized and orchestrated 11 mail art exchanges, plus three postcard ones, in which participants would send Quigley five self-designed postcards and in return receive five from the pool.

But despite the ongoing success of her social experiment, Quigley knew she was ready to move on. "I decided to stop running the MAC because it took a lot of my time to organize new exchanges and set people up together as pen pals," Quigley says. "I wanted time to do other projects. I felt that I accomplished what I wanted to."

So what's next for Quigley? She's got an alternative dance ensemble, Out-Going Dance Theater, in the works, which she describes as "performance art meets modern dance meets theater." And in place of MAC, a collective zine will rise. Slated for release Jan. 30 on etsy.com, So Nice to Finally Meet You is more new direction than new beginning, since the majority of the submissions have come from MAC artists. The zine will showcase a mix of photographs, essays, sketches and drawings by a host of up-and-comers from Philadelphia — including Mark Price, Elizabeth Thamm, Natasha Smith, Shelby Donnelly, Brian Westenhiser, Patrick Danielson and Quigley herself. "I love the idea of a zine because it's homemade, like mail art," Quigley says, "but people can take it home and add it to their collection of homemade DIY art or refer back to it as inspiration."

Looking forward to her new role, she says, "My job is somewhat like a curator. I get together mail artists to create a kind of catalog where viewers can see what goes on behind the envelope."

(aaron.moselle@citypaper.net)

Out-Going Dance Theater will perform Wed., Feb. 7-8, as part of the Community Education Center's Etc. Performance Series. Visit myspace.com/etcseries for more information.