Correspondence sent to Mari Carmen Rámirez from Edgardo Antonio Vigo (envelope)

Edgardo Antonio Vigo was a prolific producer of prints, sculptures, visual poetry, performative works, and publications. In the mid-1960s, he began sending “mathematical poems,” or visual riddles in the form of Mail art, to the French poet Julien Blaine. Vigo’s Mail art practice soon reached an extensive network that included the Blanton, bringing international attention to his work centered in the provincial city of La Plata. Mail art emerged as a movement in the 1950s and 1960s when artists around the world began sending small-scale works on paper through the postal system. As a decentralized network connecting artists on the peripheries of the art world, Mail art proposed radical forms of communication, solidarity, and distribution of art outside of institutions like galleries, auction houses, and museums. Vigo’s work was inexpensive and reproducible due to the handmade, accessible aesthetics of paper-based materials associated with the mail, such as postcards, envelopes, rubber-stamps, and recycled images. He created objects with a sense of irreverence, envisioning each recipient’s unique experience of receiving and opening the mail.