The Town of Vienna and its post office scored a victory this month against a bureaucratic regulation that threatened a longtime forum for local students' self-expression.
For years, the interior of the Vienna Post Office has served as a sort of town refrigerator on which students' artwork is displayed. A few months ago, however, all of the artwork came down.
"The post office has a standardization policy, where the customer comes in and everything is in the same place, and everything looks the same," said the branch's carrier supervisor, James Timmons, noting that the policy is applied nationwide. "But there was just so much interest in it."
When the artwork was taken down in the early fall, the lobby was being refurbished. An interim postmaster was filling in, and "there was a misunderstanding as to what could and couldn't be in the office at the time," said the current acting postmaster, Chuck Adams. Since then, he said, the office managed to find enough wiggle room in the federal "retail standardization" policy to allow the art back onto the walls. "We had to work it a little bit," said Adams.
A FRESH BATCH of photography, painting and three-dimensional artwork from James Madison High School was hung about the lobby around the beginning of January.
Ingrid April-Levey, the art department chair at James Madison, said she was told that Mayor Jane Seeman had written a letter to postal authorities after receiving several complaints from town residents. Shortly, she said, the post office was asking for more artwork. "So we just took stuff off our wall," said April-Levey. "We're very pleased."
In fact, Seeman wrote a series of letters to the Postal Service's district manager. "I was determined not to let this thing drop," she said, noting that she had received a number of e-mails on the subject and that "everybody was upset about it." In her letters, she said, she had written that the post office "has been so much a part of the Vienna community," mentioning its participation in the town Halloween Parade and the ViVa! Vienna! festival, and she had added that the students and residents alike were proud to see the work displayed there.
"So I'm thrilled," she said of the artwork's return to the post office walls. And as Virginia's Jamestown 2007 celebration nears, Seeman said, she hopes to see student work related to the event as she sends out her mail.
"Since I was postmaster in Vienna back in the 1990s, I'm very familiar with Vienna and very supportive of this program," said Northern Virginia District Manager Michael Furey, who gave the final approval to put the artwork back up. "We found the necessary loophole, and common sense took over."