CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Ephemera
Printed and handmade items meant for brief use and then discarded, such as posters, tickets, flyers, postcards and zines.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Ephemera are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Ephemera are printed or handmade items meant for short-term use and then thrown away: posters, handbills, tickets, invitations, menus, labels, postcards, trade cards and zines. Because so few survive, they often preserve what grander records leave out, from the look of a Victorian music-hall bill to the typography of a protest.
Some ephemera came from major artists. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891) was pasted on Paris walls as advertising. Emory Douglas designed bold graphics for the Black Panther Party's weekly newspaper from 1967. In the 1960s and 1970s Fluxus artists and Latin American mail artists such as Paulo Bruscky and Edgardo Antonio Vigo deliberately chose postcards, stamps and envelopes, because they were cheap and could circulate beyond official control. Folds, pinholes, tape marks and fading are part of an item's history rather than faults to hide.
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