The Art of Junk Mail — South End Artist Ari Glass Commissioned to Make Art for Grocery Ad Bundle

by Jas Keimig

South Seattle residents got an extra treat in their mailboxes this week in the most mundane of places — their junk mail.

Wrapped around a bundle of coupons, business advertisements, political campaign posters, and missing people bulletins is the work of South Seattle artist Ari Glass. The front of Glass' mailer is a frenetic assembly of paintings, text, and photographs. Images of the Kingdome and Mount Rainier are snuggled between and underneath drawings of a humanoid lion on a throne, and an image of Ra as a falcon. All of this is buttressed by graffiti-like text scattered across the page, which says things like "THE POWER IS IN YOUR HANDS (AND NOW'S THE TIME)" and "SAVE MORE."

Glass' mailer is part of a larger commission-based public art project from Black Embodiments Studio (BES), an arts writing incubator and public programming initiative dedicated to Black art, called Current Resident. The project takes its name from the "Current Resident" colorful direct mail packet — a.k.a. "shared mail package" — every household receives regularly, stuffed with coupons and ads for businesses and politicians. Recently, BES purchased ad space from printer and distributor VeriCast on the wrap that contains the coupons, and, on June 11, this bundle was sent to 158,000 addresses in several zip codes across the South End of Seattle.

Current Resident's main mission is to present free artwork from Black artists in the most accessible unexpected places (junk mail), and push the boundaries of what we call "public art." Besides a QR code, there's very little information explaining the project on the mailer itself. It's an experiment in disruption of people's daily routine of going to the mailbox, sorting through what's trash and what's of value, and, in this instance, perhaps taking the time to ponder a piece of art. For BES director and University of Washington associate professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Kemi Adeyemi, the possibilities of what could happen with Glass' mailers are thrilling.

"I love the idea that people might throw this away," Adeyemi wrote in an email. "I didn't want this to be a precious project. I wanted to pay a Black artist to do something cool and to give it to as many people as possible. Maybe someone will keep it, put it on their refrigerator or in their papers, but eventually the non-archival paper will discolor and disintegrate, the QR code link will be broken."

Adeyemi chose Glass — who grew up and currently resides in the South End — to be the first artist commissioned in this project because of the intricacy of his work. In addition to his painting and musical practice, Glass also cofounded Paradice Avenue Souf, a creative agency that celebrates the Black community in Seattle through murals, visual art installations, and clothing design.

"Ari is so smart in the way he embeds text and form in one another, and has a sharp eye for that balance between art and advertisement," said Adeyemi. "He really was a perfect fit, as I was hoping to commission someone whose work could speak to the kind of graphic language in grocery circulars: lots of color and text; mass-produced but lots of imperfections in terms of color quality or print borders, etc."

To create this project, Glass drew on a variety of influences. Growing up in the diverse South End, references to Black American, East African, Cambodian, and Filipino culture blend in together in Glass's work peeking out in the form of ankhs and namaste symbols. "Here, especially in South Seattle, it's like a miniature world where we have everybody, and they're all living together," he said in an interview. "Some of the food, some of the flavors are similar, some of the ways that we do things is similar."

The late '90s and early '00s Internet is also a heavy presence in his work, emphasizing the connectedness of the world we live in. He cleverly plays with the idea of junk mail as both a cyber and physical concept in the mailer, inserting logos of credit card companies, barcodes, and "ORDER NOW" graphics in a chaotic mishmash of images.

"When I'm creating compositions, I try to do something that's past, present, future in a way where you have these different things but it's all at the same time," said Glass. "We go through different times, but the essence of a human's spirit is always the same, we always have the same goal."

In the middle foldout is a giant blue image of the globe peppered with red dots to mark major cities on every continent. Seattle is specifically highlighted with a giant photograph of Mount Rainier looming over our mossy corner of the Earth. "INTERESTED IN SAVING THE WORLD?" the image asks the viewer in a squiggly, large font with "TODAY, TOMORROW, TODAY, TOMORROW" written in smaller text along the bottom of the mailer. "The essence of the 'TOMORROW TODAY' slogan is: 'What we want is possible today,'" says Glass.

Adeyemi has plans to continue commissioning these public art pieces from Black artists in the grocery wrap ad space but for different areas of the city. She said she hopes to expand the project into a mini-residency of sorts, bringing Black artists to live in the areas these mailers get sent to for a period of time. But it's really all about getting more eyes on Black art in this unconventional fashion.

"Best case scenario, someone who looks closely at those grocery circulars every week got to spend time with Ari's work, that it interrupted a routine moment for them and maybe they had some new thoughts or new ideas, or just a change of pace for like five minutes," Adeyemi said of Current Resident. "All those little moments are exciting to me."

Featured Image: Wrapped around a bundle of coupons, business advertisements, political campaign posters, and missing people bulletins is the work of South Seattle artist Ari Glass. (Photo: Jas Keimig)