Anton Van Dalen - Signed watercolor bird drawing on Exit Art envelope with signed and inscribed invitation to "The Memory Cabinet" - for Rick Gallagher, 1990

Anton Van Dalen - Signed watercolor bird drawing on Exit Art envelope with signed and inscribed invitation to "The Memory Cabinet" - for Rick Gallagher, 1990

The unique drawing on the Exit Art envelope is hand signed by the artist in watercolor ink on the bird's wing. The exhibition invitation is hand signed and inscribed in ink.
For those of us who are nostalgic about the East Village art scene of the late 1980s, this work - by quintessential East Village denizen Anton Van Dalen - done on the exterior front of on an Exit Art envelope, bearing show invitation inside, and sent to East Village fixture Rick Gallagher - is a highly collectible artifact of a bygone era.
Van Dalen was a well-known East Village artist and lifelong pigeon keeper who famously maintained a pigeon coop on the roof of his nearby home on Avenue A. Van Dalen bred a pure-white variety of high-flying Tippler pigeons and doves. Rather than using them as simple, traditional symbols of peace, his work uses the birds to mirror human migration, community care, and resilience against the harsh realities of urban neglect, technology, and capitalism. Images of doves and pigeons are his absolute signature motif and core iconography, symbolizing community, peace, and migration. For Van Dalen, birds serve as symbols of peace, freedom, community, and migration, as well as lifelong personal companions.
For 30 years, van Dalen served as the assistant to the legendary New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg. This relationship heavily shaped the clean, punchy, graphic noir and line-heavy cartoon aesthetic seen across this series.
This work was done on an pre-addressed envelope from Exit Art, a prominent alternative art space formerly located at 578 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Exit art was a highly influential, trailblazing non-profit alternative art space in New York City that operated from 1982 until 2012. Exit Art changed locations as it expanded. It originally opened in SoHo (briefly on West Broadway, and later at its famous 548 Broadway location printed on your envelope) before relocating in 2002 to a massive, multi-story venue in Hell's Kitchen, where it spent its final decade 
The envelope and invitation that comprises the present work was to promote Exit Art’s pivotal solo mid-career retrospective for van Dalen titled "The Memory Cabinet: Paintings, Drawings, Objects 1950–1988". It was also the venue where he premiered major installation pieces, such as The Pigeon Car (1987)—a literal car-shaped sculpture built to house live white pigeons.
The envelope with original signed drawing, and invitation with signed and inscribed note in ink have both been floated and framed in a museum quality handmade wood frame under UV plexiglass.
Measurements:
Framed:
18 inches (vertical) by 14.5 inches (horizontal) by 2 inches
Invitation:
8 inches (vertical) by 9 inches (horizontal)
Envelope with watercolor drawing:
4.25 inches (vertical) by 9 inches (horizontal)
The addressee, Rick Gallagher, is a New York-based art collector, antiquarian, and specialized dealer. He is best known in the Manhattan art and design circles as the founder and proprietor of Spirit & Matter, an eclectic gallery and antiquities shop that operated for years in the East Village and Lower East Side. Gallagher amassed a highly respected, curated collection of Southeast Asian tribal art, antique artifacts, natural curiosities, and rare oddities.
Living at 168 Avenue B during the late 1980s and 1990s, Gallagher was situated directly in the heart of Alphabet City's booming avant-garde art scene. His personal and professional relationships with local neighborhood artists—like Anton van Dalen—and alternative spaces like Exit Art made his mailbox a frequent destination for unique pieces of mail artlike this one.

MORE ABOUT ANTON VAN DALEN
Born in Holland to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton van Dalen (1938-2024) witnessed firsthand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during World War II. After immigrating to New York in 1966 and settling in the East Village, van Dalen served as witness, storyteller, and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighborhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. van Dalen presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; and EXIT Art, New York, NY, among others. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Drawing Center, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, MA; New Museum, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Artists Space, New York, NY; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; among others. Anton: Circling Home, a documentary by Morgan Schmidt-Feng, Dennis Mohr, Katy Swailes and Will Nold, premiered in 2020 and was named DOC LA’s Best Documentary Portrait. In 2022, Black Dog Press and P·P·O·W published the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, Anton van Dalen: Community of Many, featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, as well as an interview with artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. His work was featured in The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection at The Drawing Center, New York, NY in Fall 2024.