Ray Johnson

A prodigious compilation of works from the late 20th century's great collage and correspondence artist

This major monograph presents a vast selection of work by Ray Johnson made between 1950, the year after he moved to New York City from his hometown of Detroit, up to just before his death in 1995. In a new essay, artist Matt Connors describes the "blooming off-ness [and] staunch instability" of Johnson's visual lexicon as "the true harmonics, the real sound of Johnson's project." Novelist and poet Lucy Ives illuminates the artist's understudied relationship to the work and life of Emily Dickinson, which Ives describes as "one of his most unnerving and productive transhistorical collaborations." This volume also features a reprint of critic Henry Martin's rollicking 1972 text on Johnson, in which he asserts that the artist "cuts things up in order to make them tell the truth and then he keeps all the pieces to be sure that he will continue to be able to tell the whole truth."
Ray Johnson (1927-95) was a pioneering figure in the Pop and Conceptual art movements. Coming of age in the downtown New York art scene of the 1950s, he worked across a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, collage, mail art and publications--approaching each mode as a node in a larger Gesamtkunstwerk that encompassed his way of moving through the world. Notoriously elusive, Johnson was called the "the most famous unknown artist" by the New York Times in 1965.