Ray Johnson: Correspondences

In 1995, the resolutely reclusive Ray Johnson reemerged into the spotlight when he died in a mysterious and spectacular way, leading to the discovery of thousands of works of art in his house. Drawing upon this vast trove, Donna De Salvo, the Wexner Center’s Curator at Large, has organized Ray Johnson: Correspondences, the first comprehensive exhibition to be mounted (with the complete cooperation of the artist’s estate).

Like Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and later Andy Warhol and Jim Rosenquist, Johnson combined the signs and symbols of contemporary culture with the lessons of abstraction to develop a new lexicon of forms. A pioneer in the use of ‘found’ images and techniques of mechanical reproduction, Johnson created in 1955 what may have been the first informal happening.

Johnson first created ‘mail art’ in the fifties. These were part collage, part manifesto, part parody; he often instructed recipients to ‘add to’, ‘return to’, or ‘send to’, spawning an interactive art form, a continuous happening, that pre-figured electronic mail. Johnson was the nerve center of this pre-digital netscape that spread around the nation and, eventually, the world, which continues to flourish today.

By the eighties, Johnson was a legend in the artistic community. Ray Johnson: correspondences, offers the first opportunity for in-depth examination of the work of an artist who reflected and dissected many of the aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical preoccupations of the last forty years; a figure whose impact and influence will finally be made known.

About the Author:
Donna De Salvo is Curator-at-Large at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. She was formerly the Robert Lehman Curator at The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York. Best known for her curatorially innovative exhibitions and catalogues Past imperfect: A Museum looks at Itself (1992, The Parrish Art Museum) and Face Value: American Portraits (1995-6)she has also served as adjunct curator for the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

224 pages, Flammarian, 1999, as new in hardcover with dust jacket,oversized, 8.5×11.5″ 200+ illus., color and bw, dustjacket.

$ 125.00

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