OM.2026.068 - Tamara - USA

OM.2026.068 - postcard correspondence - 4 x 6 inches - Tamara - USA

OM.2026.069 - postcard correspondence - 4 x 6 inches - Tamara - USA

 

Tamara Wyndham is a contemporary American painter, performance artist, illustrator, and mail artist based at the Westbeth Artists Housing in New York City. For over four decades, Wyndham has woven her extensive background in archaeological artifact illustration together with ritualistic performance and mail art networking to explore the sacred, immediate presence of the physical body. [1, 2]

An overview of her unique dual background, material strategies, and network contributions reveals:

Archaeological Roots and Visual Poetry

• Scientific Precision: Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wyndham studied traditional drawing and painting at California State University, Long Beach, and experimental bookworks at UC Irvine before permanently moving to New York. [1]
• The Excavation Impact: For nearly two decades (1995–2013), she worked on historic archaeological excavations across Egypt, Turkey, Spain, Belize, and California, creating precise technical line drawings of ancient artifacts. This deep immersion in ancient iconography, tools, and mythologies heavily informs the structural look of her visual art. [1]

Aesthetic Style: Body Prints and Redacted Text

• Contact Body Prints: A core pillar of Wyndham's fine art practice involves making direct canvas impressions of the human form. She manually applies vibrant acrylic paint directly onto a model's body or hands and presses it onto cotton cloth or raw canvas. She then layers fluid colors around these raw, uninterpreted shapes to evoke visceral spiritual traditions. [1, 2, 3]
• The "No Context" Mail Art Project: Within the mail art network, Wyndham is widely recognized for her highly distinct, collaborative comic strip mailings. She takes pre-existing comic strips, completely covers the original text with white-out, photocopies the blanked narrative panels, and sends them out to mail art peers to fill in with new, absurd meanings. [1]
• Redacted Ephemera: Curators highlight her mail art postcards for their thick, unexpected cardstock backings and their use of elusive, redacted linguistic fragments that turn standard text into an entirely abstract visual enigma. [1]

Group Exhibitions and Global Curation

• A Book About Death: In 2009, Wyndham was a core participating artist in Matthew Rose’s historic, open-source global mail art milestone, A Book About Death, hosted at the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in New York City. 
• Radical Spaces: Her visual poetry sheets, activist prints, and body-art canvases have been heavily featured across prominent New York underground spaces, including exhibitions at the Exit Art Gallery, ABC No Rio (as part of the Broadthinking collective), and the annual Postcards from the Edge benefit. [, 2]