Essay: Mailing the Moment

When digital means of personal communication became standard in 2020, the world lost its sense of touch. Virtual happy hours replaced the familiar clink of celebratory pints. Kisses blown into a camera occupied the space that could no longer be filled with embraces. But one daily, tactile act remained: receiving mail. And thus, Akron Art Mail was born and the challenge to artists and authors was set: capture your experience of 2020 and condense it into a 4 x 6 postcard. The responses display a breadth of experiences as complex as the epoch that birthed them.

Hope is an overriding theme in this collection. Author Hanif Abdurraqib spoke about his faith in a brighter future and a hope that the reader can join him there. A similar sentiment runs through Philip Metres’s poem, which describes a perilous escape to freedom where the narrators “can rise / meet the shore.” Likewise, artist Justin Michael Will printed the phrase “Today is going to be” on his postcards, followed by handwritten words like “tomorrow” and “great,” embodying the hopeful potential contained in a single day.

Many of these works celebrate the slower pace and solitude this era allowed them. In her work, Maria Alejandra Zanetta depicted a table set for one, complete with a lone croissant. Author Brad Warner wrote of the strange quietude of the COVID-19 era, “a wonderful time to settle into silence.” A celebration of silence also ripples through Sequoia Bostick’s set of postcards. A solitary figure peeks inquisitively through sunflowers in one image; in another, a woman stretches tall, enjoying the cool embrace of moonlight while she tends to her plants.

This connection to the natural world is another common thread, with author Joanna Wilson rejoicing in the respite of hiking mask-less on a trail, breathing “as freely and as deeply as we want without fear of contagion from others.” Several works spotlight more whimsical images of nature, like Dinara Mirtalipova’s dancing goats, Dave Szalay’s stag with curling horns, and Joan Colbert’s kingly crow.

Though 2020 offered several of these silver linings, this collection would not be a true encapsulation of the year without acknowledgment of its difficulties. In her poem, Mary E. Weems described the terror felt when the narrator interacts with the police: “I freeze when I see them on the streets, / I say silent prayers / I try not to stare / or be seen.” Similarly, David Hassler wrote of the need to “honor the breath of George Floyd,” while Thrity Umrigar issued a call to break out of our boxes and “take the first, tentative steps toward a freshly imagined world.“

Now, over a year later, we are beginning to take those tentative steps, with these postcards standing as a record of our transition into this era. With this shift in mind, the question posed by April Bleakney in her postcard feels like a guidepost for our moves in this new world:

“How to grow from this moment?”

Reggie Lynch
Curator of Community Engagement
Akron Art Museum