Postal Arm: a return to correspondence courses and drawing

This lecture asks a simple question: did we, as artists and educators, replace a good network (postal) with a bad one (internet)?

The lecture proceeds through a historical overview of correspondence instruction, Mail Art practices, and a comparative analysis of two very different educational experiments — Black Mountain College and the Barnes Foundation; and includes a contemporary experiment in postal drawing.

Dr William Platz is an American-Australian artist, teacher and researcher with a disciplinary focus on Drawing who exhibits and publishes regularly in the US, Europe and Australia. With research concentrations in life drawing, portraiture and pedagogies of drawing, his recent work confects drawing, the body and puppets. Dr Platz resides in Brisbane and is currently Head of Drawing at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Dr Platz completed his BFA and MA degrees in New York and his PhD in Australia.