Ray Johnson
Encyclopedia
Raymond Edward Johnson (1927–1995), known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada
and early Pop art
. Once called “New York’s most famous unknown artist", Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art
events associated with the Fluxus
movement and was the founder of a far-ranging mail art
network – the New York Correspondence School - which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long island and remained there until his suicide.
Johnson left Detroit after high school in the summer of 1945 to attend the radically progressive Black Mountain College
in North Carolina, where he stayed for the next three years (spending the spring 1946 semester at the Art Students League in New York but returning the following summer). Josef Albers
, before and after his notable sabbatical in Mexico, was in residence at Black Mountain College for six of the ten semesters that Johnson studied there. Anni Albers
, Walter Gropius
, Lyonel Feininger
, Robert Motherwell
, Ossip Zadkine
, Paul Rand
, Alvin Lustig
, Ilya Bolotowski, Jacob Lawrence
, Beaumont Newhall
, M.C. Richards
, and Jean Varda
also taught at BMC during Johnson’s time there. Johnson decided on Albers’ advice to stay at BMC for a final term in summer 1948, when the visiting faculty included John Cage
, Merce Cunningham
, Willem de Kooning
, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold
. Johnson took part in “The Ruse of Medusa” – the culmination of Cunningham’s Satie Festival - with Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Lippold, Ruth Asawa, Arthur Penn, and others among the cast and crew. “Because of those who participated, the event has taken on the reputation of a watershed event in ‘mixed media’…” wrote Martin Duberman in his history of BMC.
, Jasper Johns
, Cy Twombly
, Ad Reinhardt
, Stanley Vanderbeek, Norman Solomon
, Lucy Lippard, Sonja Sekula, Carolyn Brown and Earle Brown
, Judith Malina
, Diane Di Prima
, Julian Beck
, Remy Charlip
, James Waring
, and innumerable others. With the American Abstract Artists
group, Johnson painted geometric abstractions that, in part, reflected the influence of Albers. But by 1953 he turned to collage and left the American Abstract Artists, rejecting his early paintings, which he would later burn in Cy Twombly’s fireplace. Johnson began to create small, irregularly shaped works incorporating fragments from popular culture, most notably the Lucky Strikes logo and images from fan magazines of such movie stars as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple. In the summer of 1955, he coined a term for these small collages: “moticos”. He carried boxes of moticos around New York, showing them on sidewalks, at cafes, in Grand Central Station and other public places; he asked passersby what they thought of them, and recorded some of their responses. He began mailing collages to friends and strangers, along with a series of manifestos, mimeographed for distribution, including “What is a Moticos?”, excerpts of which were published in an article by John Wilcock in the inaugural issue of the Village Voice.
A friend of Ray’s, art critic Suzi Gablik, brought photographer Elisabeth Novick to document an installation of dozens Johnson’s moticos in autumn of 1955. (Most of these were destroyed or recycled by the artist.) “The random arrangement … on a dilapidated cellar door in Lower Manhattan may even have been the first informal Happening,” she recalled later. According to Henry Geldzahler, “[Ray’s] collages ‘Elvis Presley No. 1’ and ‘James Dean’ stand as the Plymouth Rock of the Pop movement.”. Ray’s friend Lucy Lippard would later write that “The Elvis … and Marilyn Monroe [collages]… heralded Warholian Pop.” Johnson was quickly recognized as part of the nascent Pop generation. A note about the cover image in January 1958’s Art News pointed out that “[Jasper] Johns’ first one-man show … places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson”.
Johnson worked part-time at the Orientalia Bookstore in the Lower East Side as he began to deepen his understanding of Zen philosophy and to employ "chance" in his work. Both of these interests increasingly informed his collages, performances, and mail art. Johnson also found occasional work as a graphic designer. He had met Andy Warhol by 1956; both designed several book covers for New Directions and other publishers. Johnson had a series of whimsical flyers advertising his design services printed via offset lithography, and began mailing these out. These were in joined in 1956-7 by two small promotional artists’ books, BOO/K/OF/THE/MO/NTH and P/EEK/A/BOO/K/OFTHE/WEE/K, self-published in editions of 500.
Johnson participated in about a dozen performance art events between 1957 and 1963 – in his own short pieces ("Funeral Music for Elvis Presley" and "Lecture on Modern Music"), in those of others (by James Waring and Susan Kaufman), and via his own compositions performed by his colleagues at The Living Theatre
and during the Fluxus Yam Festival
of 1963. From 1961 on, Johnson periodically staged events he called "Nothings", described to his friend William Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening”, which would parallel the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow
and later Fluxus events. The first of these, "Nothing by Ray Johnson", was part of a weekly series of events in July 1961 at AG, a venue in New York operated by George Maciunas and Almus Salcius; Yoko Ono
’s first solo show was on view in the gallery at the time. Ed Plunkett later recalled entering an empty room. “… Visitors began to enter the premises. Most of them looked quite dismayed that nothing was going on … Well, finally Ray arrived … and he brought with him a large corrugated cardboard box of wooden spools. Soon after arriving Ray emptied this box of spools down the staircase … with these … one had to step cautiously to avoid slipping … I was delighted with this gesture.” Johnson’s Second Nothing took place at Maidman Playhouse, New York, in 1962.
Johnson’s first known piece of mail directing a recipient to "please send to..." someone else dates from 1958; the phrases "please add to and return", “please add and send to”, and even “please do not send to” followed. Johnson’s mail art activities became more systematic with the help of several friends, particularly Bill Wilson and his mother, assemblage artist May Wilson
, along with Marie Tavroges Stilkind and Toby Spiselman. In 1962, Ed Plunkett named Johnson’s endeavors ‘the New York Correspondence School’. On April 1, 1968, the first of the meeting of the NYSC was held at the Society of Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place in New York City. Two more meetings were called by Johnson in the following weeks, including the Seating-Meeting at New York’s Finch College, about which John Gruen reported: “It was … attended by many artists and ‘members’ … all of whom sat around wondering when the meeting would start. It never did … people wrote things on bits of paper, on a blackboard, or simply talked. It was all strangely meaningless – and strangely meaningful.” Johnson staged such events regularly, often following them up with witty typed reports, photocopied for wide distribution via the post. Such gatherings continued to be held in various guises into the mid-1980s.
Johnson produced the 12 known unbound pages of his enigmatic BOOK ABOUT DEATH in 1963-5. Consisting of cryptic texts and drawings (mostly) by Johnson, they were mailed a few at a time, randomly, and offered for sale via a classified ad in the Village Voice., thus very few people ever received all the pages. Something Else Press
published Johnson's The Paper Snake for a wider audience in 1965. Remarking about himself and the book, Johnson said:
On June 3, 1968 - the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas
with a gun she’d stored under May Wilson’s bed – Johnson was mugged at knifepoint. Two days later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Severely shaken, Johnson moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, and the next year bought a house in nearby Locust Valley, where Richard Lippold
and his family resided. He began to live in a state of increasing reclusion in what he called a “small white farmhouse with a Joseph Cornell attic.”
During the 1980s Johnson purposefully receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider, maintaining personal connections via mail art and telephone largely in place of physical interaction. Only a handful of people were ever allowed into his house in Locust Valley. Eventually, Johnson ceased to exhibit or sell his work commercially altogether. His underground reputation bubbled beneath the surface into the 1980s and 90s despite his general absence from the flourishing New York art scene. Johnson feverishly continued to work on richer and more complex collages. In contrast to his physical seclusion, Johnson's pre-digital network of correspondents increased in size exponentially.
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
and early Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
. Once called “New York’s most famous unknown artist", Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
events associated with the Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
movement and was the founder of a far-ranging mail art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
network – the New York Correspondence School - which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long island and remained there until his suicide.
Early Years and Education
Born in Detroit, Michigan, on October 16, 1927, Ray Johnson grew up in a working class neighborhood and attended an occupational high school where he was enrolled in the advertising art program. He took weekly classes at the Detroit Art Institute and spent a summer drawing at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan, affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago.Johnson left Detroit after high school in the summer of 1945 to attend the radically progressive Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
in North Carolina, where he stayed for the next three years (spending the spring 1946 semester at the Art Students League in New York but returning the following summer). Josef Albers
Josef Albers
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....
, before and after his notable sabbatical in Mexico, was in residence at Black Mountain College for six of the ten semesters that Johnson studied there. Anni Albers
Anni Albers
Annelise Albers was a German-American textile artist and printmaker. She is perhaps the best known textile artist of the 20th century.-Life:...
, Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....
, Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist.-Life and work:...
, Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
, Ossip Zadkine
Ossip Zadkine
Ossip Zadkine was a Belarusian-born artist who lived in France. He is primarily known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs.-Early years and career:...
, Paul Rand
Paul Rand
Paul Rand Paul Rand Paul Rand (born Peretz Rosenbaum, (August 15, 1914 — November 26, 1996) was an American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Westinghouse, ABC, and Steve Jobs’ NeXT...
, Alvin Lustig
Alvin Lustig
Alvin Lustig was an American graphic designer and typeface designer. He studied at Los Angeles City College, Art Center, and independently with Frank Lloyd Wright and Jean Charlot. He began designing for books in 1937. In 1944 he became Director of Visual Research for Look Magazine. He also...
, Ilya Bolotowski, Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth...
, Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall was an influential curator, art historian, writer, and photographer. His The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photo history textbook...
, M.C. Richards
M. C. Richards
Mary Caroline Richards was a poet, potter, and writer best-known for her book Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person....
, and Jean Varda
Jean Varda
Jean Varda was an artist. He was of mixed Greek and French descent...
also taught at BMC during Johnson’s time there. Johnson decided on Albers’ advice to stay at BMC for a final term in summer 1948, when the visiting faculty included John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold
Richard Lippold
Richard Lippold was an American sculptor, known for his geometric constructions using wire as a medium....
. Johnson took part in “The Ruse of Medusa” – the culmination of Cunningham’s Satie Festival - with Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Lippold, Ruth Asawa, Arthur Penn, and others among the cast and crew. “Because of those who participated, the event has taken on the reputation of a watershed event in ‘mixed media’…” wrote Martin Duberman in his history of BMC.
New York Years
Johnson moved with Richard Lippold to New York City by early 1949, rejoining Cage and Cunningham and befriending, within the next couple of years, Robert RauschenbergRobert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors...
, Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
, Stanley Vanderbeek, Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, antiwar activist, and current candidate for the United States House of Representatives. Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting...
, Lucy Lippard, Sonja Sekula, Carolyn Brown and Earle Brown
Earle Brown
Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems...
, Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Judith Malina is an American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.-Early life:...
, Diane Di Prima
Diane di Prima
Diane Di Prima is an American poet.-Early life:Di Prima was born in Brooklyn. She attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan...
, Julian Beck
Julian Beck
Julian Beck was an American actor, director, poet, and painter.-Early life:Beck was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, the son of Mabel Lucille , a teacher, and Irving Beck, a businessman. He briefly attended Yale University, but dropped out to pursue writing and...
, Remy Charlip
Remy Charlip
Abraham Remy' Charlip is an American artist, writer, choreographer, theatre director, designer and teacher.-Career:He studied art at Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan and fine arts at Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 1949.In the 1960s Charlip created a unique form of...
, James Waring
James Waring
James Waring was a dancer, choreographer, costume designer and theatrical director based in New York City in the 1940s through the 1970s. He was a prolific choreographer as well as a dedicated teacher who selflessly helped his students and proteges to advance their careers, while maintaining a...
, and innumerable others. With the American Abstract Artists
American Abstract Artists
American Abstract Artists was formed in 1936 in New York City, to promote and foster public understanding of abstract art. American Abstract Artists exhibitions, publications, and lectures helped to establish the organization as a major forum for the exchange and discussion of ideas, and for...
group, Johnson painted geometric abstractions that, in part, reflected the influence of Albers. But by 1953 he turned to collage and left the American Abstract Artists, rejecting his early paintings, which he would later burn in Cy Twombly’s fireplace. Johnson began to create small, irregularly shaped works incorporating fragments from popular culture, most notably the Lucky Strikes logo and images from fan magazines of such movie stars as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple. In the summer of 1955, he coined a term for these small collages: “moticos”. He carried boxes of moticos around New York, showing them on sidewalks, at cafes, in Grand Central Station and other public places; he asked passersby what they thought of them, and recorded some of their responses. He began mailing collages to friends and strangers, along with a series of manifestos, mimeographed for distribution, including “What is a Moticos?”, excerpts of which were published in an article by John Wilcock in the inaugural issue of the Village Voice.
A friend of Ray’s, art critic Suzi Gablik, brought photographer Elisabeth Novick to document an installation of dozens Johnson’s moticos in autumn of 1955. (Most of these were destroyed or recycled by the artist.) “The random arrangement … on a dilapidated cellar door in Lower Manhattan may even have been the first informal Happening,” she recalled later. According to Henry Geldzahler, “[Ray’s] collages ‘Elvis Presley No. 1’ and ‘James Dean’ stand as the Plymouth Rock of the Pop movement.”. Ray’s friend Lucy Lippard would later write that “The Elvis … and Marilyn Monroe [collages]… heralded Warholian Pop.” Johnson was quickly recognized as part of the nascent Pop generation. A note about the cover image in January 1958’s Art News pointed out that “[Jasper] Johns’ first one-man show … places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson”.
Johnson worked part-time at the Orientalia Bookstore in the Lower East Side as he began to deepen his understanding of Zen philosophy and to employ "chance" in his work. Both of these interests increasingly informed his collages, performances, and mail art. Johnson also found occasional work as a graphic designer. He had met Andy Warhol by 1956; both designed several book covers for New Directions and other publishers. Johnson had a series of whimsical flyers advertising his design services printed via offset lithography, and began mailing these out. These were in joined in 1956-7 by two small promotional artists’ books, BOO/K/OF/THE/MO/NTH and P/EEK/A/BOO/K/OFTHE/WEE/K, self-published in editions of 500.
Johnson participated in about a dozen performance art events between 1957 and 1963 – in his own short pieces ("Funeral Music for Elvis Presley" and "Lecture on Modern Music"), in those of others (by James Waring and Susan Kaufman), and via his own compositions performed by his colleagues at The Living Theatre
The Living Theatre
The Living Theatre is an American theatre company founded in 1947 and based in New York City. It is the oldest experimental theatre group still existing in the U.S...
and during the Fluxus Yam Festival
Yam festival
The Yam Festival is a popular holiday in Ghana and Nigeria, usually held in the beginning of August at the end of the rainy season. It is named after yams, the most common food in many African countries. It is also known as "Ikeji" in Nigeria. In Nigeria, dancers wear masks that reflect the seasons...
of 1963. From 1961 on, Johnson periodically staged events he called "Nothings", described to his friend William Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening”, which would parallel the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
and later Fluxus events. The first of these, "Nothing by Ray Johnson", was part of a weekly series of events in July 1961 at AG, a venue in New York operated by George Maciunas and Almus Salcius; Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
’s first solo show was on view in the gallery at the time. Ed Plunkett later recalled entering an empty room. “… Visitors began to enter the premises. Most of them looked quite dismayed that nothing was going on … Well, finally Ray arrived … and he brought with him a large corrugated cardboard box of wooden spools. Soon after arriving Ray emptied this box of spools down the staircase … with these … one had to step cautiously to avoid slipping … I was delighted with this gesture.” Johnson’s Second Nothing took place at Maidman Playhouse, New York, in 1962.
Johnson’s first known piece of mail directing a recipient to "please send to..." someone else dates from 1958; the phrases "please add to and return", “please add and send to”, and even “please do not send to” followed. Johnson’s mail art activities became more systematic with the help of several friends, particularly Bill Wilson and his mother, assemblage artist May Wilson
May Wilson
May Wilson was an American artist. A pioneer of the feminist and mail art movement, she is best known for her Surrealist junk assemblages and her "Ridiculous Portrait" photocollages.-Biography:...
, along with Marie Tavroges Stilkind and Toby Spiselman. In 1962, Ed Plunkett named Johnson’s endeavors ‘the New York Correspondence School’. On April 1, 1968, the first of the meeting of the NYSC was held at the Society of Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place in New York City. Two more meetings were called by Johnson in the following weeks, including the Seating-Meeting at New York’s Finch College, about which John Gruen reported: “It was … attended by many artists and ‘members’ … all of whom sat around wondering when the meeting would start. It never did … people wrote things on bits of paper, on a blackboard, or simply talked. It was all strangely meaningless – and strangely meaningful.” Johnson staged such events regularly, often following them up with witty typed reports, photocopied for wide distribution via the post. Such gatherings continued to be held in various guises into the mid-1980s.
Johnson produced the 12 known unbound pages of his enigmatic BOOK ABOUT DEATH in 1963-5. Consisting of cryptic texts and drawings (mostly) by Johnson, they were mailed a few at a time, randomly, and offered for sale via a classified ad in the Village Voice., thus very few people ever received all the pages. Something Else Press
Something Else Press
Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by Higgins, Ray Johnson, Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, John Cage, Emmett Williams and others. The Something Else Press was an early publisher of...
published Johnson's The Paper Snake for a wider audience in 1965. Remarking about himself and the book, Johnson said:
I'm an artist and a, well, I shouldn't call myself a poet but other people have. What I do is classify the words as poetry. …The Paper Snake… is all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had given to the publisher, Dick HigginsDick HigginsDick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
, editor and publisher, which I mailed to him or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years. He saved all these things, designed and published a book, and I simply as an artist did what I did without classification. So when the book appeared the book stated, ‘Ray Johnson is a poet,’ but I never said, 'this is a poem,' I simply wrote what I wrote and it later became classified.
On June 3, 1968 - the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist writer, best known for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto, which called for male gendercide and the creation of an all-female society.-Early life:Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey, to Louis...
with a gun she’d stored under May Wilson’s bed – Johnson was mugged at knifepoint. Two days later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Severely shaken, Johnson moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, and the next year bought a house in nearby Locust Valley, where Richard Lippold
Richard Lippold
Richard Lippold was an American sculptor, known for his geometric constructions using wire as a medium....
and his family resided. He began to live in a state of increasing reclusion in what he called a “small white farmhouse with a Joseph Cornell attic.”
Locust Valley Years
From 1966 into the mid-1970s, Johnson’s work was shown at the Willard Gallery (New York) and Feigen Gallery (Chicago and New York), as well as by Angela Flowers in London and Arturo Schwarz in Milan. In 1970, mail from 107 participants to curator Marcia Tucker was exhibited in a Ray Johnson - New York Correspondence School exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - a significant moment of cultural validation for Johnson. Another notable exhibition followed - Correspondence: An Exhibition of the Letters of Ray Johnson at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, 1976, organized by Richard Craven: 81 lenders’ works, 35 years of Johnson’s outgoing mail. Around that time, Johnson began his silhouette project, creating approximately 200 profiles of personal friends, artists, and celebrities which became the basis for many of his later collages. His subjects included Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Edward Albee, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Lynda Benglis, Nam Jume Paik, David Hockney, David Bowie, Christo, Peter Hujar, Roy Lichtenstein, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, among others - a who's who of the New York arts and letters scene.During the 1980s Johnson purposefully receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider, maintaining personal connections via mail art and telephone largely in place of physical interaction. Only a handful of people were ever allowed into his house in Locust Valley. Eventually, Johnson ceased to exhibit or sell his work commercially altogether. His underground reputation bubbled beneath the surface into the 1980s and 90s despite his general absence from the flourishing New York art scene. Johnson feverishly continued to work on richer and more complex collages. In contrast to his physical seclusion, Johnson's pre-digital network of correspondents increased in size exponentially.
Death
On January 13, 1995, Johnson was seen diving off a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and backstroking out to sea. His body washed up on the beach the following day. Many aspects of his death involved the number "13": the date; his age, 67 (6+7=13); the room number of a motel he’d checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7=13), etc. Some continue to speculate about a ‘last performance’ aspect of Johnson’s drowning. Hundreds of collages were found carefully arranged in his home. He left no will and his estate is now administered by Richard L. Feigen & Co.Film & Television
Following his suicide, filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter (in conjunction with Frances Beatty of Richard L. Feigen & Co.) spent six years probing the mysteries of Johnson's life and art. Their collaboration yielded the award-winning documentary "How To Draw a Bunny", released in 2002. The film includes interviews with artists Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Billy Name, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Judith Malina, and many others.External links
- Artpool’s Ray Johnson site
- Johnson, Ray with Diane Spodarek and Randy Delbeke. "Ray Johnson Interview”, Detroit Artists Monthly, February, 1968
- Ray Johnson's Estate - represented by Richard L Feigen
- Ray Johnson Resources
- Ray Johnson and New York Correspondance School by William S. Wilson 1966
- Nick Maravell's website about Ray Johnson
- Artistamp Gallery - Ray Johnson
- Essay by Ina Blom
- http://www.mailart.be/ray_johnson.html