Exhibition Coordinator: Kathy Tycholis
Artists from all over the world have contributed postcard-size artworks for the 2023 Mail Art Exhibition and Fundraiser. Organized in tandem with the exhibition Sonja Ahlers: Classification Crisis, this open-call exhibition invited artists to mail in one original piece of artwork in response to the theme of “collecting and reassembling.”

Fritillaria camschatcensis: plants, people, places
The International Mail Art Exhibition and Fundraiser theme Collecting & Reassembling, provides a great opportunity to look at plants, people and places.
Four stamps were chosen for the collecting element of the theme. One from each country in relation to the distribution of Fritillaria camschatcensis. A plant with a long association with native peoples throughout the coastal areas of the Pacific Rim.
Each of the four stamps were reassembled placing Fritillaria camschatensis as their focus, therefore change the original meaning of these miniature artworks.
Within the genus Fritillaria, only F. camschatcensis is found on both sides of the Pacific. Estimates suggest an eastward migration more than 10 million years ago, a symbolic pathfinder for human migration both ancient and modern.
Richmond Art Gallery is a non-profit municipal art gallery in the City of Richmond on the coastal of Lower Mainland British Columbia, Canada. Richmond is situated between the two estuarine distributaries of the Fraser River, occupying most of Lulu Island. The Coastal Salish peoples once collected bulbs of Fritillaria camschatcensis on Lulu Island where it would have been widespread. Today it is confined to Finn Slough in the south of the island, with its own rich history of human migration. According to the 2021 Census three-quarters of the Richmond population identified as Pan Asian.
Plant stories frequently focus on beauty, rarity, or novelty. This sequence shows how common plants cross political, cultural or racial boundaries to highlight our interconnectedness.

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