Jim Joe and Lewy Turn the Postal Service Into a Drawing Studio

A postcard is a drawing surface with a built-in interruption. It can be addressed, stamped, handled, delayed, stained, lost, or delivered. For Jim Joe and Lewy, that interval became the structure of a long-distance studio.

Letters to the Editor, now at Market Gallery in New York, brings together 186 postcards made over the past several years. Jim Joe began each image and sent it through the mail for Lewy to complete. Neither artist controlled the finished drawing alone; each had to respond to a mark already committed to paper and to the time that passed between one hand and the other.

A correspondence made visible

The resulting drawings feel less like illustrations than interrupted thoughts. A haircut becomes a lizard. A boot meets a tiny winged figure. Feet acquire faces and hardware. A mechanical press carries a cruciform body above the word “REPEATER.” The imagery is funny, anxious, crude, meticulous, and oddly tender, often within the same few inches.

The postcard format keeps the exchange intimate while exposing it to an impersonal system. Postal marks, handling, and the faint printed architecture of the cards remain part of the work. Unlike a shared digital file, each object had to leave one artist’s possession before the other could answer.

Graffiti practice at postcard scale

Both artists emerged through graffiti, where authorship is public, unstable, and frequently overwritten. The postcard project compresses those conditions. The surface is private enough to fit in a hand but collaborative enough to resist a single signature. One drawing arrives as an invitation, obstruction, and problem for the other artist to solve.

The reduction in scale is also a change in audience. Graffiti addresses whoever passes the wall; a postcard is sent to a named recipient. At Market, those private exchanges return to public view as an accumulated field of 186 small works.

A rooftop gallery for slow images

The setting reinforces the exhibition’s handmade logic. Market Gallery grew from the creative community surrounding Adam Zhu’s Chinatown apartment, where a rooftop shed served as a studio and rehearsal space before being renovated into a gallery in 2024. The postcards occupy that compact setting alongside a larger mural of a whimsical street scene.

Jim Joe and Lewy have collaborated at much larger scales before. Their 2016 exhibition Piece of Dirt introduced 800 joint works, and both contributed to the graffiti-covered Manhattan streetscape built for Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2019 presentation. Here, abundance remains, but spectacle gives way to correspondence.

The letter as obsolete technology

The exhibition arrives with a limited catalogue produced by Red Lebanese and Autonomous Media Organization, available through Market during the run. Its premise is deliberately unfashionable: writing, mailing, waiting, and answering become creative tools precisely because instant communication has made them feel obsolete.

Letters to the Editor remains on view through November 15. Market Gallery schedules visits by appointment through contact@marketgallery.nyc or its social account. See the complete installation in Erin Ikeuchi’s report for Hypebeast.