Mail art and community-sourced art projects are not new, of course. My first exposure was Frank Warren’s Post Secret, which in 2005 began asking people to anonymously share their secrets via postcard. The project’s simple humanity and the responses it elicits always makes me cry.
But to be honest, I hadn’t thought about Post Secret in a while. And then I was scrolling Instagram and came across Jenny Lam’s Dreams of a City project (IG link). At first in New York City, and now in Chicago, she distributed postcards and posed a simple question: “Tell me one thing you dream of doing before you die. Use this card as your canvas.”
I loved Lam’s project instantly, and it inspired me to create Finger Lakes Hopes.
Lam is a curator, and listening to her speak it is no surprise her project resonated. She spoke virtually in February at Arizona State University’s Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER), discussing “curation as a tool to bring communities together.”
“My mission is always to make art accessible,” said Lam. “Most people might feel intimidated going into a comtemporary art gallery, and I always try to do away with that because art is for everyone.”
In 2012 she curated an exhibit titled “I Can Do That,” which displayed work from artists artound the globe but also invited viewers to either create their own version of the art or to make changes — directly on the artist’s original piece. Engagement is “vital for community building,” Lam said at the LASER talk.
Much thanks to Lam for the inspiration. Her Dreams of a City project is now more than a decade old. That’s fantastic. I’ve loosely borrowed her “use this card as your canvas” line for FLXHopes, because I love its somewhat vauge call to action. Please check out her blog!