A couple of years ago, Frank Warren began a community art project; he left hundreds of blank postcards in public places and handed them out to strangers. They offered a simple invitation: "You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative."
Warren received more contributions than he knew what to do with. As the secrets came pouring in, the project took on a life of its own. Each one is a work of art, illustrating the secret it depicts. They range from funny -- one, covered in Post-Its, message notes and paper clips, reads "I waste office supplies because I hate my boss" -- to poignant -- another, with a photo of a real arm next to a photo of a prosthetic one, reads "I smile sweetly and pretend to sympathize with my friends who are always fighting with their mothers. c9 I would give my left arm just to have my mother alive to fight with."
The exhibit grew out of the Baltimore-Washington area, with the first exhibit of the postcards at Artomatic in Washington D.C., an event put together annually by D.C. artists to display the work of other local artists. After the exhibit closed, Warren continued to receive thousands of secrets, and the project grew into an online blog at http://www.postsecret.com. Warren reads all 800 to 1,000 secrets that he receives each week and posts a handful of new ones on the Web site every Sunday. According to Technorati, a blog-tracking service, PostSecret.com is now the third most popular blog on the Web, a year after its creation.
The project extends even further than that - it has since been transformed into a book, PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives and a traveling exhibition that displays new postcards. On Tuesday, May 23, Frank Warren, a Maryland native himself, will be at Golden West Caf8e from 7 to 9 p.m., right here in Hampden. Along with Davy Rothbert from Found Magazine (a magazine and book that collects interesting notes, letters, and pictures that people send in), Warren will be sharing postcards that didn't make it into the book, discussing the project, and signing copies of the book -- which can be purchased at Atomic Books, right across the street.
The secrets, which Warren refers to as "graphic haiku," have offered people something that they don't normally have - the opportunity to express themselves honestly and anonymously. Anyone can be an artist, and any secret is legitimate. Perhaps the real reason the project has become so popular lies somewhere in the secret of our shared humanity: Everyone has a secret, and everyone has the need to share with someone.
The cards not only offer people a chance to reveal a part of themselves, they offer other people a chance to view them and realize they're not alone. Under some secrets are anonymous comments from people with the same secret, same fear, same hope. One reader from Ohio writes, "Dear Frank, How I wish I could hug everyone and tell them that its OK. It's OK to be scared and angry and hurt and selfish. It's part of being human." The Web site includes also includes the number and Web site for Hopeline, a suicide network, something that many of the postcards deal with.
"Some of the postcards are really works of art, and when I read the new ones each week, I always find some that I relate to. Some of them are really sad; it opens your eyes --- it could be from a person walking past you down the street and you would never know," freshman Alex Downs said.
Not all of the cards are sad though; some offer hope as well. On this week's site, over a background of scattered pennies and the repeated phrase "Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck," black letters read "I put down pennies on the ground so someone will find it and have hope that their day will get better."
Warren's editor, in the preface to the book, calls him "the most trusted stranger in America." As Warren said, "Sometimes art and healing are the same thing."
