Today I got a postcard in the mail urging me to join Art Mail Milwaukee at artmailmilwaukee.com. My free membership would get me a weekly e-mail with an original artwork by a Wisconsin-based artist. The site also has an arts calendar.
I went to the site, which was easy to use, and signed up and now I await my first artwork. In the meantime, I got a link to the see the first example -- a Technicolor landscape by Milwaukee painter Jim Finnerty -- sent today.
Art Mail Milwaukee is the brainchild of Johnathan Crawford.
"(I) got the idea when I realized I had missed so many gallery nights and was frustrated I wasn't staying in tune with all of the cool art out there," Crawford told me today.
"Plus, everyone is so bombarded with messages these days, the idea of ‘just a piece of art' with minimal words struck me as the ‘zig while everyone else was zagging.' For me it's therapeutic to open something in my e-mail and NOT have to respond, think, worry, whatever. I can just look at art I haven't seen before and enjoy. We call it 'stepping off the hamster wheel of life' for a moment every week."
Crawford says he's received a lot of support from local artists and gallery owners but he expects that nearly half his subscribers will ultimately be from outside the area.
"The art community is really behind this as you'll see by the list of people who literally jumped in to help. It's been weird because every art, design or creative person who's seen it says the same thing, ‘this is really cool.' And Neil Hoffman from MIAD commented that he thought the idea was ‘brilliant.'"
The next e-mail is due to ship Jan. 16, so if you sign up now, you should be there in time to get it.
"Our hope is to help people realize this is a art-savvy town and a cool place to live," says Crawford.
Why not help him?
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
