When Frank Warren started a community arts project in November 2004 allowing strangers to write secrets on postage-paid postcards and mail them to him, the Germantown, Md. resident probably wasn’t prepared for the phenomenon, but he welcomed every bit of it.
“I printed up 3,000 postcards and left them at Metro stops, libraries, art galleries … a week or so later, secrets starting coming in,” he said.
Warren, a small-business man for more than 15 years, recognizes the art in each postcard mailed to him. He receives 100 to 200 postcards each day, from all over the world. The postcards have been set up as art displays at various museums and venues around the U.S., as well as printed in three books and posted on his Web site at postsecret.blogspot.com, which is updated every Sunday.
“There’s art, a photograph, something that furthers the secret,” he said. “I like that the project is a bit subversive, I think it’s wonderful that 200 or 300 or 400 of these could be posted on the walls [of a museum] next to the Monets.”
As far as the authenticity of each card, Warren said he doesn’t question if it’s a real secret or not.
“I think of them as works of art,” he said. “[As for] which ones areinvented, I believe that someone believes they invented it, but they are just not at the point where they are ready to admit that. Someone once said, ‘All art is a lie we tell ourselves to understand the truth better.’ ”
A few weeks into the project, Warren reflected on his own life and found he had buried secrets and had never shared them with anyone.
“I shared them with my wife and my daughter, and [then I] mailed it to myself,” he said. “I found that process therapeutic, I found that healing. I think I started it because I felt compelled to and the real motive was to reconcile secrets in my own life.”
The Post Secret project has linked arms with 800-hopeline and the Kristin Brooks Help Center, and has helped raise more than $75,000 for the suicide prevention organization.
“The issue of suicide has touched me in a number of ways and I was a volunteer for them, so I knew the good work they were doing,” he said.
The popularity of the project has prompted people to instigate personal versions of Post Secret and sometimes Warren gets to hear about it through his Web site.
And does he think anyone in the Bush administration sends in Post Secrets?
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “I respect the anonymity of all the secrets I receive.”
» For more information, visit Postsecret.blogspot.com or www.hopeline.com
