The Postal-Collage Project No. 1 was first exhibited in Berkeley, California in the historic Shuman Block, followed by an exhibition at Ramon’s Tailor in San Francisco.
The exhibition reception at the Shuman Block in Berkeley was well attended. A festive climate filled the halls as 60-80 enthusiastic visitors created a buzz of conversation, broadly expressing appreciation for the diverse collection of more than 50 collaborative collages.
Many project participants were on hand, sharing their experiences with friends and co-collaborators. A work table was well used by young visitors making fresh collages.
A slide-show featuring images of collages-in-progress was projected in the little studio theater, along with ‘travelogue’ pictures of contributor work-spaces and postal deliveries. The exhibit also included a mosaic of envelopes that had carried work around the world.
The Ramon’s Tailor exhibition in San Francisco was also well attended and full of friendly enthusiasm, though the two exhibitions were quite different in a couple of ways.
The Berkeley walls are high, long, and white, creating large, bright, boxy halls, while the walls of Ramon’s Tailor are lustrous wood, giving the intimate space a warm, amber glow.
The display in Berkeley was arranged group-by-group in a spacious, horizontal, linear manner, while in San Francisco, the collages were composed in arrays of multiple rows and columns, on black boards, and with no regard for keeping the pieces together in their original groupings.
A third exhibition, in June 2012, brought the collages back to the Shuman Block, where they were displayed as a single mosaic.
