Thomas (Tomasz) Schulz (born 1951) became part of the international Mail Art-network in the mid 1970s, exchanging works with artists all over the world by posting and receiving them from his home in Lądek Zdój in Poland. Schulz also came into close contact with artists from the GDR such as Friedrich Winnes, Robert Rehfeldt and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, whom he met personally at exhibitions and performances in East Berlin and Warsaw, among other places. The works often contained politically subversive messages, so that Mail Artists in the People's Republic of Poland as well as in the GDR were monitored by the state security services.
However, with the rise of the Polish Solidarność movement, which the GDR government opposed, travel across the German-Polish border became increasingly difficult. In addition to some trips by train and hitchhiking through the Federal Republic and to East Berlin, which he documented in artistic diaries, Thomas Schulz also sent out notebooks, to "travel" for him by mail. In these volumes, called "Coop Books," he invited artists from the international Mail Art network to design a few pages and then forward the books to friends or acquaintances around the world. In this way, collaborative art books were created, which after some time were filled with greetings, addresses, stamps, collages, drawings and other contributions and returned to Thomas Schulz. Today he keeps them with many other mail art documents in his private archive in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
Thomas Schulz' entry in the Mail Art Index: https://mailartists.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/tomasz-schulz/
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