My Own Art Museum

Today we have e-mail, texting, snapchat, facebook, and instagram—and it can be hard to remember that most of our parents had…the landline telephone? So, when my Mom was growing up in the 60s and 70s she, like so many others before her, used postcards as a way to communicate with those not in her immediate surroundings, and that habit has continued throughout her life. My Mom doesn’t like to throw things away and so in my life, her love of postcards has manifested in a household collection of what must be well over 2,000.

        About two years ago I was visiting one of my favorite museums, the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) in Boston, and they had a feature show on postcards. Curators sorted out about 400 postcards from a huge collection and organized them by theme, date etc. The collection tried to highlight the artistic value that postcards had—as many famous artists and some not so famous ones used the postcard as an artistic medium. Not only that, but the show presented an interesting lens through which to view the last century. Coming away from the show, I gained a new appreciation for the postcards my Mom has collected over the year—I felt as though I had unknowingly had access to a mini-art museum of my own my whole life.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve had a postcard rack in my living room. On rainy days or just when there was extra time, I remember taking out all of my Mom’s numerous post cards and picking a theme. It could be a color, like red or orange, or a place, like the Eiffel Tower, or an artist, like Van Gough…and sure enough there would invariably be 20+ postcards that fit into the desired category. The display will stay up for a while until we get bored, and then a new one will take its place. It can reflect the mood of the season (in winter it’s blue, and green, summer red, yellow etc.) or it can contradict it to remind us of what’s not here (like fields of flowers in the dead of winter and ski photos in the spring). If we are in a traditional mood, Victorian women in frilly frocks will stare back at us, but just as often, Picasso and Chagal tumble up and down the rack. Sometimes no theme exists except for the sender, or date. A huge number of the postcards in the collection are those my Grandpa sent to my Mom, but also my sister and I—so in honor of him and his excellent taste, sometimes only his postcards will be exclusively displayed.

   This constant postcard presence in my life has led me to treasure them as a really unique form for art, but also communication. On vacation, I would say my family purchases an average of 20-30 postcards without fail, wherever we are. My problem is that sometimes I love the image so much that I don’t want to send it—I usually will hang it on my wall instead. Recently, we went through and organized all of the postcards that my Mom has amassed. She did most of the work, but towards the end of the process I was flipping through to look for images to hang in my locker (at school). I started to read the backs of them, and it was fascinating to see the short notes people had sent to my mom over a period of 40 years. Some were about fun vacations, others jobs (a huge theme was dissertation work and woes), others simply about the daily routines of life—and it struck me that this was history in my hands. Some of my mom’s friends had continuously sent her postcards for over thirty years; reading them you could literally chart their lives. It’s crazy to think that in my lifetime, some of those postcards will be close to a hundred years old!