Priority on Positivity for the Public

I can’t remember exactly when I discovered Priority Mail. I don’t mean literal Priority Mail, the kind that you send when you almost forgot Mother’s day, but rather a project at Princeton University that uses Priority Mail stickers and boxes for a purpose the author-artist considers worthy of priority: brightening someone’s day. According to its tumblr, which chronicles the project’s progress, Priority Mail began in the fall of 2010. Although I’m not certain as to the month or day I personally discovered PM, the experience of discovery has stuck with me, and serves as testimony to the project’s success.

It was another one of those all too frequent days or nights (they melt one into the other in times like these) when I felt totally overwhelmed. At least one assignment was late, I was struggling to motivate myself to complete another on time, and on top of that I felt sick and tired of putting any effort into any of my classes when it felt like trying didn’t make a difference. The joint forces of academics and procrastination had once again stolen all my free time and left me paralyzed under a deluge of unattended responsibilities. Life sucked, this was the result of my own failings, and trying to try was hopeless.

During one of several such self-pitying and melodramatically miserable moments of my college career, I discovered Priority Mail. I was dragging my leaden feet down the stairs of Lewis Library after several awful hours of looking at bikini models or Facebook or something similarly useless instead of writing a program or essay when my listless gaze caught on some unexpected package label stuck to a radiator. It was a simple sticker, the kind with a space for “From” and “To”. In loud, all-caps, black permanent market it read: “YOU CAN DO IT” Note: I may be wrong about the location, this could have happened in some other building, but I swear the story is true! To say that I instantly picked myself back up those stairs and wrote my overdue program/essay/problem-set would be a lie, but I can honestly say that I teared up.

I had lost faith in myself, as is easy to do when letting oneself sink into this kind of self-indulgent depression, and the idea that this random-ass sticker stuck on a radiator or its anonymous author believed that I really could “do it” moved me. For an instant, I felt like that sticker was meant just for me, and I believed it. I soon remembered that the author had no way of knowing that I would pass this way or that I would have recently felt like shit. Even so, the sticker reminded me of the potential for somebody to have faith in me, and this possibility revived my faith in myself.

Alright, I lied. This wasn’t my first Priority Mail sticker. But it was the first one with so powerful an impact on me, so much so that I remember distinctly just how that moment felt. This is my Priority Mail sticker, the one that I’ll never forget.

My real first PM sticker, as far as seeing a postage label with some cute message scrawled on it goes, was the first PM sticker. The sign tells us to stop whatever trivial pursuits we may be engaged in and “make someone smile today”.

To make someone smile today was the founding message of Priority Mail and is still the project’s mission. As is written on the tumblr:

“priority mail is also an attempt to make people think. it aims to remind the public that creativity belongs in the lives of all people. the stickers are meant to be unexpected injections into our common environment. they are tiny vessels of inspiration, reflection, and positive thought.”

The mission statement and choice of postage labels as the primary medium of Priority Mail bespeaks a respect for and awareness of the author-artist’s chosen means of expression. Street art is particularly well-suited to make people smile because we, the audience, have learned from our dreary goings through septic corridors not to expect wisdom and beauty in our everyday spaces. These messages are immediately attention-grabbing in their surprising presence in the library when we’re feeling down. As our mysterious stickerer has noted, Priority Mail injects itself into our everyday.

Furthermore, street art, by virtue of its use of public spaces, reclaims these spaces for the public and democratizes art. By its very nature, street art transforms sidewalks into open galleries, reminding the viewer, as aptly phrased by PM, “that creativity belongs in the lives of all people.”

PM’s work is different from much of the street art that is classified as street art rather than graffiti because each message is conveyed by written word, rather than image. Although most, arguably all good, street art utilizes the medium’s on-your-block/in-your-face presence to convey a message or provoke thought, this usually involves a visual element that also spruces up a dingy wall. PM is more literary, and the beauty it presents to the viewer is more figurative. Rather than repurpose sidewalks as art galleries, perhaps PM would be more accurately described as transforming a university campus into an open diary of positive aphorisms.

These two traits of street art, unexpectedness and immediacy, result in a particularly personal experience for the viewer, for she is allowed to stumble on the image and make of it what she will without the interference of prior knowledge. The image places itself in the viewer’s path instead of requiring the viewer to set out to see it. The viewer is invited at any moment to take a peek into this public diary. Priority Mail will always make someone smile because the author-artist knows something about how it feels to be right here, right now, and each message ze leaves in zir wake invites the lone viewer to find it, understand it, and make it her own.

For more on Priority Mail, check out this article about the “Mystery Stickerer” from The Ink.