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Letters Mingle Souls Mail Art Exhibition Catalog
Letters Mingle Souls self published, limited edition exhibition catalog is available for order.
Letters Mingle Souls solo exhibition at The Brattleboro Museum
March 11 - June 11, 2023
Curated by David Rios Ferreira
Brooks’ work provides a meditative and spiritual passage for messages written by suicide-loss survivors to reach their loved ones and, in effect, other survivors, while broadening the perspectives and dialogues around the narrative of suicide. Brooks collaborates with survivors and shares their words and sentiments through text and collage compositions that nearly fall off the edges of reclaimed boards, postcards, and book covers that the viewer is encouraged to handle. View installation images from the exhibit here.
RHYTHM group exhibition at apartment gallery
March 27 - April 24
Curated by Josephine Lacosta and Jade Novarino
Rhythm was the prompt we gave to each artist to work with or push back on, to use or discard. Each artist made an edition of 15 works which will be on display but will also be for sale as a mailable exhibition. A second iteration of the show will be exhibited at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, as part of their Epistolary series (more information coming soon).
Evidence of Circumstance group exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
March 17 - April 22, 2023
Curated by Josephine Halvorson
Mitsuko Brooks sends mail art to friends, strangers, and her future self, releasing personal messages into public circulation. As a librarian, Brooks collects discarded book covers, onto which she collages diaristic writings, wishes, words of protest and resistance, and archival material. Neighbors and postal workers contribute additional markings, sometimes unintentionally, folding together author and recipient.
Invented Archives exhibition at Allegheny College
January 24 - March 3, 2023
Curated by Paula Burleigh
Invented Archives explores ways of knowing rooted in care, affect, and speculation. Artworks by Mitsuko Brooks, Angie Jennings, and Diana Sofia Lozano gesture toward shared knowledge among various kinship networks, human and beyond. Brooks’ intimate mail art collages and large-scale paintings picture dispatches of solidarity, messages which traverse long distances to foster community.
FEELING LANGUAGE exhibit at NIAD
October 1 - 28, 2022
Curated by Kate Laster
This show is all about comfort text: resilience in everyday words, writing and reading. Expression can also be wordless, the use of line and color as new vocabulary, pushing a thought out onto a surface, making marks and continuously trying to communicate with the world.
We tell stories to sustain ourselves and find each other. These messages embedded in art become an emotional telegram– a signal flare with a flame of memory trailing behind it.
NIAD is a progressive art studio for adult artists with developmental disabilities, redefining contemporary art in Richmond, California.
Books and Things at Helen J Gallery
September 10 - October 22, 2022
Curated by Cameron Masters
“The historical basis for this concept comes from a sub-genre of still life painting from the Joseon Dynasty in Korea, where intellectuals and magistrates commissioned screens depicting shelves filled with collections of literature, symbolic fruits, art supplies, and auspicious objects for their offices and studies. Called Chaekgeori (책거리) or “books and things,” these paintings of shelves served a decorative function, but also overtly and subliminally clued visitors into their owners’ preoccupations and aspirations.
Artists’ studios and scholars’ studies draw clear analogies — both are workshops, collections, and refuges. And whether incidentally or not, these private spaces and their contents also double as portraits of their occupants.
For this group exhibition, artists’ works [are] displayed in both halves of the gallery. Each piece is accompanied by a shelf with a small number of books or small objects taken from artists’ studios or studies. The objects will affect how viewers interpret the artists’ work — exactly how is at the artist’s discretion.”
EFA Project Space Exhibition
June 25 - July 30, 2022
Curated by Claire Kim
EFA Project Space is proud to present between and within, the 2022 SHIFT Residency for Arts Workers culminating exhibition featuring new works by artists Mitsuko Brooks, Lionel Cruet, Zatara McIntyre, Emily Shanahan, Sara Shaoul, and Jevijoe Vitug.
“Using different approaches to layering, Brooks and McIntyre re-create visual representations of connection and communal healing in their large-scale paintings. Brooks paints enlarged versions of her own mail art—a personal and long-standing practice of sending handmade postcards to friends and family."
Mail Art Workshop with BPL
April 27, 2022
I led a mail art workshop at Brooklyn Public Library’s Windsor Terrace branch.
Japanese American National Museum Artist Conversation: Mitsuko Brooks & Reiko Fujii
October 2020
Moderated by Rino Kodama, the JANM's Media Arts Intern, funded by the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship Program.
Virtual artist talk with Reiko Fujii (we met through the Asian American Women's Artists Association) sharing our creative practices and roles as artists during political unrest, connecting over art as a means of emotional, mental, and spiritual processing, and a tool for confronting trauma.
We Live in Real Time: A Window Exhibition of Mail Art Made During the Pandemic
July 2020
My mail art collage is on view at Printed Matter St. Marks: 38 St Marks Place, New York, NY at the Swiss Institute
PDF of exhibition catalog free download here
Printed Matter Video with Mitsuko Brooks
April 16, 2020
Watch a video of me talking about how my mail art began and how it has operated while I sit inside my living room art studio
Feature in Graphite Issue VII
2016
Page 5 features The Wheel Card, 42 x 42in — scrap wood, spirit doll handmade by artist, banana peel, orange ring, eucalyptus leaves, bark, tarot deck box part