The art of collecting seems an almost intuitive human trait. Whether gathering seashells at the beach, amassing stationery for sending on some future day, acquiring postcards in every city you've ever visited, collecting art (cough cough), or storing an object simply because it's beautiful, the collection re-contextualizes both extraordinary and mundane objects that have been amassed by some trait of sameness.

It seems only fitting that visual artists—people inspired by aesthetics—are often collectors and that these objects often become the basis of their own work. Walker Evans collected picture postcards, Diego Rivera collected iconic religious paintings and Pablo Picasso collected the artwork of his contemporaries.

Stephen Shore's A Road Trip Journal contains a collection in the form of documented daily living. While on his 1973 month-long cross-country road trip, he collected postcards, saved receipts, and recorded the minuscule details of his everyday, including what he ate, where he stayed and how much TV he watched. His notes have become a time capsule, both of the era and of the transformation of these everyday objects.

Photo of Waste Not by Song Dong from 16 Miles of String’s Flickr Photostream

Also in line with collecting the contents of everyday life, Projects 90, a recent exhibition at MoMA by Beijing-based artist Song Dong presented the work Waste Not in the museum's atrium. For the piece, the artist brought the contents from his mother's apartment, amassed over fifty years, ranging from dishware to blankets to plastic bottles to empty toothpaste tubes. As both artifact and document, the collection is both preposterous and exceedingly humble. The act of hoarding was his mother's mechanism for handling grief and a way to hold onto the tangible after her husband passed away.

Pine cones by Lisa Congdon

Several 20x200 artists are also working with, and finding inspiration in collections. San Francisco-based Lisa Congdon* started A Collection A Day on the first of the year dedicated to photographing, drawing or painting a collection for 365 consecutive days. She writes, "Since I was a young girl, I have been obsessed both with collecting and with arranging, organizing and displaying my collections. This is my attempt to document my collections, both the real and the imagined." Already on day 25, she has painted buoys, photographed eucalyptus leaves and drawn twigs amongst the many objects in her home or studio. Ranging from the fantastical to the purely functional, the objects are arranged and re-imagined as beautiful vignettes of things in her life.

Danish stamps on Clifton Burt's Folk Object

Edition-maker Clifton Burt also recently launched Folk Object, a reference page where he describes as "an ongoing collection of ornament and utility." Rife with pictures that celebrate craft, color and the handmade, he records knots, gloves, creating a collection out of found objects on the web, in books and from many other resources. Click here to see his growing set of folk discoveries.

28 Camera Drawings by Christine Berrie

Greg Krum, Christine Berrie, Jane Mount and Jason Polan also take to collecting—or creating visual groups of objects that look awfully god together. Through Christine's 28 Camera Drawings, Greg's Nymphenburg, Jane's Ideal Bookshelves and Jason's rocks, dinosaurs, birds, insects and sea creatures, we can see how the amassed is also interpreted, rearranged and made completely one's own through the art of collecting itself.

Do you know of other artists who are collectors or collection-based art? Let us know!

*Look for new work by Lisa Congdon on 20x200 this week!