Ray Johnson Transcends
NYC's Most Famous Unknown Artist
Ray Johnson, also known as “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” is the subject of a new exhibition at The Art Institute in Chicago. He was a significant (although lesser known) figure in the Fluxus movement, Conceptual art, and Neo-Dada, plus early Pop Art. The show, titled ‘Ray Johnson c/o,’ examines his fascinating but short life by bringing together over 200 of his most famous works.
Ray Johnson was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied at the Detroit Art Institute and did a summer drawing program at the Ox-Bow School. In 1945 Johnson enrolled at Black Mountain College, where he studied painting with former Bauhaus faculty members Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, and Robert Motherwell. He befriended famous lecturers such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Willem de Kooning. He moved to New York in 1949 and was active in the city’s art scene.
The incredibly diverse group of works presented in Ray Johnson c/o includes pieces from the William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson, recently acquired by the Art Institute, the original archives of the New York Correspondence School (an international mail art network which Johnson established in 1963.) His friends, as well as strangers and people he knew in passing, took part in what could be called a “postal performance.” The show includes experimental projects such as the open-ended mailer A Book About Death (1963–65) and the nonlinear artist’s book The Paper Snake (1965). Visitors will also have the opportunity to view over 100 of Johnson’s famous collages from the 1950s to the 1990s. Although he liked to work in many different mediums, he had a preference for creating collages. He would integrate images and text from various other sources, blurring the line between art and life. He also chose to distribute much of his work outside official channels. Johnson believed that “art transcends physical limitations, the restraints of time, or even identifiable goals.”
By 1954 he was making small collages known as “moticos,” he used images from popular culture such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple, and department store models. Although he seemed to be moving in the same direction as Andy Warhol (he was even held at knifepoint in lower Manhattan on the same day that Valerie Solanas shot Warhol), he had a different relationship with fame. He chose to avoid it. Johnson’s death in 1995 has been thought to be his last performance piece possibly. He drove off a bridge in Long Island, and many aspects of his death involved the number “13”: the date was January 13, his age was 67 (6+7=13), and the room number of a motel he had checked into earlier that same day was 247 (2+4+7=13).
The exhibition was curated by Caitlin Haskell, who has stated: “With the acquisition of the William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson in 2018-19, the Art Institute immediately became a leading center for the research and exhibition of Johnson’s extraordinary body of work, particularly his radical reconceptions of art in the 1950s and 60s. Ray Johnson c/o opens up the Wilson Archive to the public for the first time since its arrival in Chicago, and suggests a new approach to Johnson as an orchestrator of complex interpersonal collaborations by following the paper trails that particular correspondents amassed and preserved.” Co-Curator Jordan Carter adds that “Rather than presenting a singular Ray Johnson, the exhibition acknowledges that the artist, through his exchanges, cultivated multiple personas. So that, in a sense, everyone had their own Ray Johnson. Like the members of the NYCS, visitors to the exhibition will encounter the material, conceptual, and essentially social dimensions of works by a truly interdisciplinary artist who choreographed deeply personal collaborations through the mail—each offering a fragment of Ray and a unique perspective into his fugitive practice.”
Ray Johnson c/o is on view from November 26, 2021, to March 21, 2022. It is presented exclusively at the Art Institute. The exhibition was organized by Caitlin Haskell, Gary C., and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, with Jordan Carter, associate curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
