Mitsuko Brooks, Letters Mingle Souls,

Suicide is not a common subject for an art exhibit; only in recent years has the topic even entered public conversations. Perhaps that's because suicide has become a major cause of death in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 46,000 people took their own lives in 2020. That's to say nothing of the million-plus who attempted to kill themselves, or the more than 12 million individuals who expressed suicidal ideation, again per the CDC.

A current installation at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center bypasses taboos and statistics around suicide and goes straight to the hearts of those left behind.

In "Letters Mingle Souls," Brooklyn-based artist and archivist Mitsuko Brooks "expands mail art into the realm of social practice," writes David Rios Ferreira in his curator statement. That is, Brooks invited survivors to write messages to their loved ones lost to suicide and included the texts — rewritten in her own spidery, all-caps script — in her mixed-media collages. Her prompt to participants was this:

"What lingering thoughts, emotions, and feelings do you wish you could share with your loved one who is no longer here?"

Brooks' artist statement reveals that she has "had a lifelong focus on finding meaning in life and reason to live." And she has long included mail art — that is, original artwork literally sent through the postal system — in her repertoire.

The installation of her artworks in the BMAC gallery is ingenious. Brooks formed ribbons into square or rectangular "frames" on the white walls, filled them with a ribbon "X," and tucked the collages into them à la bulletin board. As Ferreira puts it, these presentations "simultaneously evoke the linen photo boards one might find in a teenager's bedroom and the architecturally constructed linework of Minimalist painting."

The installation technique was inspired by a series of trompe l'oeil paintings by 19th-century artist John F. Peto that depict stationery holders. Brooks discovered them, aptly, in a 1974 postage stamp series that was called "Letters Mingle Souls." Those words, in turn, came from the poem "To Sir Henry Wotten" by English poet John Donne (1571-1631): "letters mingle souls / For thus, friends absent speak."

The idea of sending consoling words preceded, by many centuries, today's "thoughts and prayers" on Twitter.

Brooks' preference for more meaningful, and artful, missives has resulted in particularly poignant keepsakes. Her mail art references the spiritual, she posits, "in hopes of bringing peace to the survivors and of connecting with the other realm."

But these works are more than letters to the dead. Ferreira suggests that they can provide "a meditative and spiritual passage" for other survivors. And perhaps any viewers whose own thoughts have turned to suicide might consider the unintended consequences of being "a loved one who is no longer here."

"Letters Mingle Souls" is on view through June 11. On Saturday, April 29, at 2 p.m., BMAC lead educator Kate Milliken and Lars Hunter, bereavement program coordinator at Brattleboro Area Hospice, lead a free, in-person workshop on creating a mail-art piece or letter to someone who has passed on. Learn more at brattleboromuseum.org.