PostSecret

In November 2004, Frank Warren began a community art project. He handed out 3,000 postcards to strangers and left themin public places in his Washington, D.C. neighborhood. Each self-addressed card invited people to anonymously write down a secret and mail it to him. Two requirements were: the secret had to be true and it had to be something that had never been shared with another person. These initial secrets were exhibited in Washington, D.C., later that year. After the first exhibition closed word of the project spread. People began crafting their own homemade postcards and the artful secrets began arriving from every continent. Today, Warren has received more than 350,000 highly personal and artfully decorated postcards illustrating the soulful secrets never voiced. The postcards continue to come at a rate of about 1,000 a week.

This extraordinary project has become an international phenomenon with thousands of people participating in scheduled PostSecret events throughout the United States. Every Sunday, Frank Warren posts secrets on his award-winning website www.PostSecret.com, which has been viewed more than 100 million times. The project has produced three bestselling books with a fourth, A Lifetime of Secrets, published in October 2007. The Everson Museum’s presentation of PostSecret features morethan 400 works of art, bringing together the most powerful, poignant and beautifully intimate secrets that Warren has received in the past four years. In addition, the exhibition includes a selection of secrets written on three-dimensional objects including a coffee bag, a prescription bottle, a floppy disc, a ballet slipper, and a Rubik’s cube with 9 scrambled secrets adhered with paper tape. Shocking, profound, petty, brave and revealing, PostSecret unflinchingly exposes the frailty and courage that hides within us all.