UCR ARTS presents Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s–2020s

Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s-2020s on exhibition at UCR ARTS' California Museum of Photography (CMP) from Sept. 13, 2025, to Feb. 15, 2026, reveals how Latinx and Latin American women artists subverted the censorship of authoritarian regimes by using the government's postal system against itself to share their work, not just within the police state, but across militarized borders to other countries.

Guest co-curated by Zanna Gilbert, senior research specialist, Getty Research Institute, and Elena Shtromberg, professor of art history, University of Utah, the exhibition features the works of over 50 artists.

Kathryn Poindexter-Akers, head of exhibitions at UCR ARTS, said the exhibition "came out of their research in the genre of mail art and just how 'male' the existing research is, no pun intended. There are very few case studies that give attention to female artists working within this genre and mail art itself is not the most robust area of study to begin with."

Now add Latinx and Latin American women, we discover a range of creative expression few people have seen and a genre few art scholars have researched.

The Mail Art movement "gained traction by the '70s as they worked to subvert dictatorships in many countries and then there are artists working in the U.S. for different reasons whether it was resisting the traditional institutional confines of artmaking or communicating across borders with families who are separated," Poindexter-Akers said.

Mail has been a part of the human experience since the rise of writing in Mesopotamia, with Egypt in 2400 BCE being the first government sponsored postal service. Letters have been considered a literary artform and a tool to subvert Empires and build communities of activists such as Paul the Apostle's epistles in the "New Testament." It's easy to think of Mail Art as a selection of pages under glass. Poindexter-Akers said, "Mindful of that, we made it more dynamic and immersive in the types of media, so we've included video, sculpture, paintings, prints, and installations."

"The work may not all be what you typically define as mail art," Poindexter-Akers said. "But it's interwoven with messages or communicating across borders, so it's divided up into thematic sections" (state control of communications media, censorship, and authoritarian violence; gender constructions and feminist ideals; migration, interconnectedness, and community at a distance; state bureaucracies and the legacies of colonialism; and decolonial approaches to ecology).

Mail Art, at its core, comes from people's desire to communicate, give news about how they and family are doing and what they need and hope. It reveals the socioeconomic and political realities they live in. Mail is an intimate form of communication, and reading other people's mail can be voyeuristic, but when repurposed in the form of public expression it becomes a diary of a people and their struggles.

In this exhibition, discarded packaging becomes art. Clarissa Tossin's "The Amazon River from Space" (ISS/NASA) reproduced the Amazon River system as seen from space in black ink on flattened Amazon envelopes. The discarded becomes sublime.

There are letters written by children, postcard watercolor paintings, and video performance art. Carmen Argote used the force of her body against wood placed over the word mother engraved on a tombstone. The force created abstracted wood impressions she printed then placed next to handwritten letters that have been redacted. These are not redacted like government documents, seen in another installation displaying all the CIA documents on celluloid. Argote's words are scribbled out with black and red ink so you can still make out the letters and words underneath. It's like you're reading through the haze of smoke and fire.

This one of a kind exhibition has a lot in it. It's almost overwhelming. But it has been curated for attendees to engage with and understand the breadth of the material and information. Those who attend will find themselves fascinated with the exhibition and with new ways of looking at mail.

After its debut in Riverside, it will travel nationally in an exhibition tour organized and sponsored by Art Bridges. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog with scholarly essays, co-published by UCR ARTS and X Artists' Books and designed by Impresos México in early 2026.

Upcoming related programs for Transgresoras are listed here: https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/events/

Header image caption/credit: Graciela Sacco, Urban Intervention No. 2, from the series Bocanada, 1993. Artist stamps, 8 1/4 x 12 1/8 inches. Getty Research Institute, ©Graciela Sacco Estate.