Eleanor Antin In Praise of Postcards: A curator reflects on the connections made by sending pictures through the mail.

MoMa.org Feb 02, 2021

This past spring, my family spent several months at my parents-in-law’s house in the woods at the end of a road. Often, the only other person we saw during the course of the day was the mail carrier. At the sound of the truck coming down the hill, my children would run to the window and exclaim, “The mail truck!” During this period, the urge to communicate by mail became so great that my daughter learned to write. This feeling, which was amplified in August by news reports about the president’s deliberate crippling of the United States Postal Service, heightened my appreciation for the humble picture postcard. Sending a postcard allows us to share a souvenir from a place we visited, or to give the experience of a work of art (even if that work remains in the collection of a museum).

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