Ray
Johnson, 1964. Mail art assemblage collage titled "Ed Brush," composed
of cut paper stamped “" Ed Brush Collage by Ray Johnson "” with a paper
cutout, and two mailed covers addressed by Johnson to Ed Brush- one c/o
Ray Johnson and one c/o Stanton Kreider- postmarked October 20, 1964,
and November 19, 1964, respectively. Mounted on board covered with
fabric, board measures 13 x 11 in. Not framed. Signed on Envelopes,
Stamped Collage by Ray Johnson
Bio from Wikipedia
Raymond Edward
"Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American
artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was
a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was
described as "New York's most famous unknown artist".[1][3] Johnson also
staged and participated in early performance art events as 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 is
occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was
never a member. 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 Cass Technical 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 progressive Black Mountain College (BMC) in North
Carolina,[4][6] 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 Bolotowsky, 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.[1] 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.

In the documentary How to Draw a Bunny, Richard Lippold confessed to carrying on a love affair with Johnson for several years.

I risk to say, [that at Black Mountain College] 'anything
went'—between the students and the faculty ... he would arrive every
morning with a little bouquet of wild flowers, and singing. Eventually
our relationship became very intimate, so I brought him back to New York
... and obviously, we didn't live together, steadily, because I had my
family. We were quite close together until 1974, so that's a long period
of time. From '48 to '74, twenty some years. Because it was a very
intimate relationship, a loving relationship.[8]

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 Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Ad Reinhardt,
Stan Vanderbeek, Norman Solomon, Lucy Lippard, Sonia 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.[1] But by 1953 he turned to
collage and left the American Abstract Artists, rejecting his early
paintings, which it is rumored that he later burned 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 Johnson's, art critic Suzi Gablik, brought photographer
Elisabeth Novick to document an installation of dozens of 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.[10] According to Henry Geldzahler, "[Ray's] collages
Elvis Presley No. 1 and James Dean stand as the Plymouth Rock of the Pop
movement."[11] Johnson's friend Lucy Lippard would later write that
"The Elvis ... and Marilyn Monroe [collages], heralded Warholian
Pop."[12] 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 on 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 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 the AG Gallery, 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."[14][15] Johnson's Second Nothing took place at Maidman
Playhouse, New York, in 1962. It was part of a variety show that was
organized by Nicholas Cernovich and Alan Marlow of New York Poet's
Theatre, had lighting design by Billy Name (aka Billy Linich), and
featured artists such as Fred Herko, George Brecht, Simone Morris, La
Monte Young, Stan Vanderbeek, and others.[16] In 1964/65, Ray Johnson
circulated publicity for an imaginary gallery called the Robin Gallery,
which was a pun on the Rueben Gallery where some of the earliest
happenings took place and was said by one critic to “put the happenings
out on the street in a series of irresponsible exploits and escapades."

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
later Toby Spiselman.[18] In 1962, Ed Plunkett named Johnson's endeavors
'the New York Correspondence School' (NYCS) – occasionally spelled
'Correspondance' by Johnson.[15][19] In early 1962, Joseph Byrd
responded to several mailings with a red rubber stamp, "THIS IS NOT
ART," which Johnson then used in his mailings for several months. On
April 1, 1968, the first of the meeting of the NYCS 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."[18] 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 13 known unbound pages of his enigmatic A Book About
Death from 1963 to 1965. 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.,[20] 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:

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 Higgins, 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

Long out of print, The Paper Snake was re-printed by Siglio Press in 2014.

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.[23] 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."

Johnson appeared twice in the Art in Process series, described by
blogger Greg Allen as "a series of topical, process-oriented, teaching
exhibitions organized by Finch College Museum director Elayne Varian.
They included sketches, models and studies to show how the artist did
what he was doing."[24]
Locust Valley years
Untitled (Seven Black Feet with Eyelashes), by Ray Johnson, 1982–1991, Honolulu Museum of Art

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.[1][4] 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 June 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. In 1981, he began a
longstanding correspondence with librarian and artists' book specialist,
Clive Phillpot.[25] 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, such as Untitled (Seven Black
Feet with Eyelashes), in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.
It demonstrates the artist's incorporation of text into collage, which
is his preferred medium. 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.[1][4] 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 had checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7=13), etc.,
although some are purely coincidences. For instance, it was later
discovered that Room 247 was the only available room in the motel on
that day. 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 fine art dealership Adler Beatty.
Film, television and music

Over seven hours of videos with Ray were created by Nicholas Maravell
in the late 1980s. Ray greatly enjoyed the creative process of making
them and liked viewing them. Ray had wanted the videos to be played at
his final scheduled gallery exhibition but at the last minute he had
reason to cancel that show and he asked that the videos not be shown.
These wishes were honored after Ray's death even when the gallery owner
tried repeatedly to have Maravell show them. Portions of the videos have
been used by several filmmakers. A Sampler of them played at Ray's
Whitney Museum retrospective after Ray's death. Robert Rodger created a
website to honor and help share these videos.

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.

The Manic Street Preachers wrote and recorded a song about Johnson,
titled "Locust Valley." Released as a B-side on the "Found That Soul"
single (2001), "Locust Valley" describes Johnson as "famously
unknown/elusive and dismantled".

John Cale's song "Hey Ray" from the Extra Playful EP (2011) is about
Cale's encounters with Johnson in New York during the 1960s.

Canadian art rock band Women's 2010 album Public Strain includes two
songs that directly reference Ray Johnson. Locust Valley is the town
where Johnson lived in New York State. Venice Lockjaw is a phrase
Johnson incorporated in pins that he made to be given away at the Ubi
Fluxus ibi Motus exhibit in 1990 at the Venice Biennale. Their 2008
album Women also featured a song called Sag Harbor Bridge, referencing
the place of Johnson's death