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Art Cards, Editions and Originals (ACEOs) and Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) are two branches of a fine-art genre in which miniature paintings, watercolors, photographs, drawings, and prints are produced on 2.5-x-3.5-inch pieces of paper or blank...
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Art Cards, Editions and Originals (ACEOs) and Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) are two branches of a fine-art genre in which miniature paintings, watercolors, photographs, drawings, and prints are produced on 2.5-x-3.5-inch pieces of paper or blank cards. Although the genre is related to the time-immemorial practice of sports fans getting together to trade their baseball, football, basketball, and hockey cards with each other, ATCs were officially introduced to the world on April 23, 1997, when a Swiss artist named M. Vänçi Stirnemann mounted an exhibition of 1,200 small works of art on card stock. He called them Artist Trading Cards or ATCs. The show, held at the INK.art&text exhibition and performance space in Stirnemann's home city of Zurich, introduced the concept of ATCs as particular works of art that conformed to specific dimensions and were meant to be traded rather than sold. On May 31 of that same year, Stirnemann's followed up his exhibition with the first ATC trading session, also at INK.art&text. For that event, artists were invited to bring their own ATCs and trade them with each other. Buying or selling ATCs was forbidden at that first ATC trading session, as it has been at all subsequent sessions since. That's because Stirnemann envisioned ATC trading sessions as commerce-free zones, where the exchange of art and the interaction of participants was given the highest value, rather than the mere objects that happened to have brought the participants together. By 2004, ATCs had captured the imagination of a Denver artist named Lisa Luree, who liked the format of ATCs but realized that selling her own ATCs on eBay would be frowned upon by the ATC community. So, she created an offshoot of ATCs that she called Art Cards, Editions and Originals, or ACEOs. The semantic distinction allowed Luree and like-minded artists to make small works of art that were meant to be sold (lest it go unnoticed, the word "Trading" is not in ACEO). Popular subjects...
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