Canceled Stamps
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna were pleasantly surprised last November when they got a call from the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum of the Chicago Academy of Sciences asking if they’d be interested in doing an exhibit there. Thompson and Hernandez de Luna are known for the pseudostamps they’ve been making and mailing for about a decade: subversive little satires that look enough like the real thing to get delivered. The canceled stamps are sold as art, envelopes and all, commanding prices of up to $2,000. But they might not be an obvious choice for the nature museum, with its stuffed animals, butterfly garden, and kid-friendly, gee-whiz attitude. Even if you overlook their more notorious work, like the close-range study of a condom going into use or Jesus and Mary getting it on, it’s a stretch: their idea of a nature stamp is a decapitated “Mad Cow,” a “skeletonized” Chernobyl deer, or an exhortation to Eat Whale. But Thompson says the museum’s director of exhibits, Michael Sarna, paid them a visit November 21, looked at the work, and followed up with a signed contract dated December 19. The show, “Stamps of a Different Nature,” would feature both existing and new pieces and would open February 8; they would receive $2,000 to cover matting and framing and an honorarium.
Museum president and CEO Joe Shacter says he first heard about the anthrax flap when one of the trustees brought up the Tribune story at a meeting. When Sarna then asked Hernandez de Luna about it, the artist owned up–but Shacter was furious that he hadn’t disclosed it earlier. “We are generally in the practice of supporting artistic expression…but…in light of the situation in our country we felt it would be inappropriate to mount that show,” Shacter says. “This gentleman exercised extremely poor judgment.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
