"A master of pseudonyms and of schizophrenia, his influence is clearly
felt everywhere." - Istvan Kantor

On November 7th 2002, CHELA will launch an exhibition that focuses on the visual and textual art work of Baltimore-based artist/writer Blaster Al Ackerman. The exhibition will display almost 3 decades of Blaster's paintings, Xeroxed drawings, collaged envelopes, hand-drawn and mass produced stamps (Artistamps), hand-drawn self-inking rubber stamps, sketches, postcards, and zine cover illustrations. Much of the work displayed comes from Blaster's involvement with the Mail Art Network, a largely underground artform that begin in the late 1960s and continues through the present.

About Blaster Al Ackerman:
(read a recent article about Blaster in the City Paper's Best of Baltimore issue)

The Clark Ashton Smith Fellowship Chapter, Leonie of the Jungle, Swarthy Turk Sellers, Eel Leonard, Ralph "$50,000 Party" Delgado, Harry Bates Club, Gnome Club and/or Gnome Kink Club, Blaster Al, Mrs. Blaster, Ernst Stroh-Symtra (please read backwards), Glans Ted Sherman, Jana Peruda, Emergency Room Metcalf, Scientific Electricity Foundation. Laurel McElwain. -- Pseudonyms used by Blaster Al Ackerman over the past 30 years of Mail Art correspondence.

"A master of pseudonyms and of schizophrenia, his influence is clearly felt everywhere." - Istvan Kantor, reprinted in: Géza Perneczky, The Magazine Network, Edition Soft Geometry, Cologne 1993, p. 178.

Blaster Al Ackerman currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, Blaster came to Baltimore in the early 1990's and has since been involved in the various and penetrating underground artist activities such as the Shattered Wig Review and 14 Karat Cabaret events, and other endeavors designed to confuse the boundaries between illicit, enlightening, and illegal.

Blaster has been a Mail Art practitioner since 1972, a time when the form was just beginning to emerge as a vital underground art movement. The work shown in the CHELA exhibition ranges from collaged postcards, letters, and envelopes sent between Blaster and his frequent correspondents, as well as Xeroxed and original illustrations, paintings, art stamps, painted jackets, and illustrations for a variety of underground and self-published zines and TLPs (otherwise known as Tacky Little Pamphlets).

Blaster is a also a well-known literary figure in avant-garde literature, and has been published in The Shattered Wig Review, Lost and Found Times, Popular Reality and others. Among his books are: "Confessions of an American Ling Master"," I Taught My Dog to Shoot A Gun," (both on Popular Reality Press), "Blaster: The Al Ackerman Omnibus" (FEH Press, NY, NY) and several publications from Luna Bistonte Press (Columbus, OH) and Shattered Wig Press (Baltimore, MD).

Major contributors to the exhibition include:
Andre Stitt (Wales), John M. Bennett (OH), John Held, Jr.(CA), Darlene Altschul (CA), David Greenberger (NY), "Eerie" Billy Haddock (OR), John Berndt (Baltimore, MD), Inex (NYC), Rupert Wondolowski (Baltimore, MD), Vittore Baroni (Italy)

About Mail Art:
"Mail art is an infinite sphere whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere." - Blaster Al Ackerman's definition of Mail Art.

Mail Art is a largely underground art form that emerged from the art "Events" of the Fluxus movement and the work of the Abstract Expressionists. It's beginnings trace back to the late 1960s when the artist Ray Johnson's birthed the aptly named, New York Correspondence School, to describe a project that would aim to create an international network of artists and poets whose primary mode of communicating, sharing, and showing artwork was through the US Postal System.

Termed the "Eternal Network" by Robert Filliou and George Brecht in 1968, one of Mail Art's primary functions was to allow artists to communicate with one another through a system that was not privileged and separate, but highly decentralized, existing outside the commercial art industry, and intent on forming communities that stressed the artists role in everyday acts of living, suffering, and creating. Today, Mail Art is a highly active art form that is practiced by thousands of artists worldwide.