For me, the highlight of the posthumous “Alice Shaddle: Fuller Circles” exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago was not any of the (stunning) larger works. It was the postcards. The curators included a sample of Shaddle’s witty, bizarre collaged cards. In one of the cards, a woman in a red polka-dot bikini with Shaddle’s face primps as she sits on a pedestal inside a light bulb; the pedestal has a banner labeled “Tunisia.” In another, a robed monk with Shaddle’s face stands in a snowy mountainous landscape. In the corner, so well-integrated you’ll miss it at first look, a cat peers out from behind what could be a hill or a flower.

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I ran into Charlie Baum, Shaddle’s son, at the exhibition opening, and he told me that his mother made 4,000 of these cards between 1992 and 2008—sometimes creating as many as six a day. They weren’t meant to be exhibited, really, but to amuse friends and family. She would send as many as three each week to her grandchildren alone. They were small, private gifts of art in which—like a wink, a signature, or a secret—she embedded herself.

The postcards exist somewhere between art and craft or between art for everyone and a project for loved ones. As such, they neatly express Shaddle’s career-long fascination with the public and private dimensions of art and how those categories have both limited and inspired women’s creativity and art-making.

Shaddle, it’s important to note, didn’t just make postcards for friends. On the contrary, she was a key figure in the Chicago art scene for decades. She exhibited frequently in the 60s and 70s;........

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