Rachel Perry Welty's postcard project
There are many ways to measure one's success as an artist. Museum exhibitions and media recognition are certainly notable achievements in an artist's career, and Rachel Perry Welty has already hit these high notes. In 2006, Welty was a finalist for the James and Audrey Foster Prize, and her video Karaoke Wrong Number (2001-2004) was acquired by the ICA as part of our collection. Earlier this year, Welty had a solo exhibition at the deCordova Museum, and her work was recently the subject of a multi-page spread in the December 2011 issue of Vogue. (Congratulations, Rachel!)
However, we decided to interview Welty about a much more humble milestone -- her first museum shop postcard (now available in the ICA Store).
ICA: I’ve purchased many museum postcards in my time – always with the motivation of remembering my visit and the artworks that moved me. That’s a tall order for a little postcard! How do you feel now that your work is the subject of a postcard?
RPW: It is a tall order, but it’s what we do anytime we snap a picture of the Eiffel Tower or buy a souvenir – against all practical reality we try to take a piece of an experience with us. I never thought I’d have my work on a museum postcard. It amazes and pleases me to think that people would want to take a little bit of the work home with them.
ICA: You have altered your postcard and made it into a new work of art. Tell us about the postcard project and some of the ideas behind it.
RPW: Several years ago when I began traveling a lot for my work, I would buy a postcard in each new place I visited, and then alter and send it home to myself. It has become a way of circumventing frustration of not being able to work on larger projects while on the road. It unwittingly became a sort of travel log, a diary, an accounting of where I have been and my artistic mood at that time. The resulting pieces are little sketches – impressions and reactions to the “souvenir” of a place and time. It’s a little adventure in the day: selecting the card, making the work at a café or in a hotel room, buying postage in a foreign city. When I found my own postcard in a rack on my last trip to Boston and the ICA, it only seemed natural that I would alter this one too. As of now I have about 60 altered postcards. And I’m still making them.
ICA: What is your process in altering the postcards?
RPW:. I carry a little “kit” in my checked baggage – an X-acto knife, various markers, Wite-out, tape and stickers and colored pencils as well as some stamps when I’m in the U.S.A. You see postcards offered for sale, sometimes curled, yellowing, gathering dust on the wire racks that support them. It’s a dying custom – who sends a picture postal card (as I recall my grandmother calling them) anymore? They will surely become extinct as we can now so easily send our own pictures in digital form instantly. But for now this material is readily available to me in every city in the world.
ICA: Where can we expect to see your work next?
RPW: My solo show Rachel Perry Welty 24/7 travels next to the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ), opening January 28, 2012 and running through July 1, 2012. I’m in the Videonale.13, a traveling show with stops in Germany, Poland, Scotland, and now at the National Taiwan Museum of Arts. You can read the interview I did with Videonale.13 here.
Look for Welty's work soon in a museum or mailbox near you!