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Ray Johnson Papers

 Collection
Identifier: MS207

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Scope and Contents

The Ray Johnson Papers (1927-2006) span 2 linear feet, and consist of an assortment of Johnson's body of work, including drawings, collages, correspondence, and exhibition materials, as well as work by other members of the New York Correspondence School, including pieces created for Johnson.

Series 1. Drawings consists of original drawings housed individually in mylar sleeves, of varied sizes, mediums, and papers (including a napkin), dating from 1965 to 1978. Series overlaps slightly with Series 4, Series 6, and Series 9, which also include some original drawings.

Series 2. Collages consists of original collages housed individually in mylar sleeves, of varied sizes and materials, dating from circa 1960 to 1985. Series overlaps slightly with Series 4, Series 6, and Series 9, which also include some original collages.

Series 3. Collage Elements consists of components or pieces of materials for use in collages, housed individually in mylar sleeves, of varied sizes and materials (including envelopes, cards, photographs, advertisements, newspaper clippings, and more), dating from 1968 to 1976.

Series 4. Mail Art and Correspondence includes mail art sent from Johnson (1 folder’s worth) and to Johnson (3 folders’ worth), with various correspondents, dating from 1960 to 1995 (with some undated). Many are in envelopes.

Series 5. Book About Death consists of a near-complete copy of Johnson’s Book About Death, his self-published, 13 page mail publication (of which pages were sent out one by one), dating from 1963-1965. Series also includes a 2002 typed document by Clive Phillpot, which describes the pages and their order.

Series 6. Mimeograph Art includes Johnson’s art made with a mimeograph (or stencil duplicator), including “Saint Valentines fingernails,” and “Silhouette University,” and posters designed by Johnson, including “Movie Star Collages” and for “The Living Theatre Dance Concert.” Series dates from 1959 to 1994 (with some undated).

Series 7. New York Correspondence School consists of documents pertaining to Johnson’s mail network, the New York Correspondence School, including mimeographs, meeting invitations, typescript reports, and more (most 8 ½ x 11 inches), dating from 1968 to 1999.

Series 9. Ed Plunkett consists of materials pertaining to Johnson's friendship with Edward M. Plunkett, who was a correspondent of Johnson's as well as a fellow mail artist and art historian. Plunkett was the originator of the name for the "New York Correspondence School." Series includes mail art, drawings, mimeograph pages, an envelope with feathers, a framed portrait of a man, and more, dating from 1927 to 1977.

Series 10. Envelopes consists of envelopes with no enclosures, addressed to Ray Johnson and others, dating from 1975 to 1993.

Series 11. Exhibitions consists of exhibition materials dating from 1949 to 2006, including promotional posters, announcements, catalogues, booklets, and cards. Materials are sub-grouped chronologically, and include a section specifically of memorial exhibitions following Johnson's death in 1995. Also includes a sub-section of materials related to exhibitions by other artists, and a sub-section related to the 2002 documentary film How to Draw a Bunny: A Ray Johnson Portrait directed by John Walter, dating from 1997 to 2002, including an advertisement card, Sundance press release, and invitations to preview screening and reception.

Series 12. Press consists of newspaper clippings and publications covering Johnson's life and work, dating from 1970 to 2003. Series includes a sub-section on press specifically covering Johnson's death in 1995.

Series 13. Reproductions dates from 1964-1970 and 2005, and consists of a reproduction of Book About Death, postcards reproducing works by or photos of Johnson, and photographs reproducing his collage art.

Series 14. Personal includes three items; Johnson’s description of his career and goals titled “My Career,” 1971, his New York Institute of Photography certificate, 1977, and a photo booth strip of a man with face obscured.

Series 15. Ruth Ford Correspondence consists of material dating from 1965 to 1990 pertaining to his friendship with actor, model, and literary salon host, Ruth Ford (1911-2009). Ford was sister to surrealist author, poet, and artist Charles Henri Ford. Series includes drawings and collages sent between them, letters and invitations to Ford from Sara Willen (an associate of Johnson's), as well as cards and empty envelopes.

Dates

  • 1927-2006

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

There are no restrictions on use of the materials in the department for research; all patrons must comply with federal copyright regulations.

Biographical / Historical

“Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a... Pop Art figure in the 1950s, an early conceptualist, and a pioneer of mail art. His preferred medium was collage, that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased (as the century wore on) collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man. Integrating texts and images drawn from a multiplicity of sources — from mass media to telephone conversations — Johnson’s innovativeness spread beyond the confines of the purely visual. He staged what Suzi Gablik described in Pop Art Redefined as perhaps the “first informal happening” and moved into mail art, artist books, graphic design, and sculpture, working in all modes simultaneously. Johnson not only operated in what Rauschenberg famously called “the gap between art and life,” but he also erased the distinction between them... Born in Detroit, Michigan on October 16, 1927, Johnson grew up in a working class neighborhood and attended an occupational high school where he enrolled in an advertising art program. He studied at the Detroit Art Institute and spent a summer in a drawing program at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan, an affiliate of the Art Institute of Chicago. Leaving Detroit in the summer of 1945, he matriculated at the progressive Black Mountain College, where he spent the next three years with the exception of the spring of 1946. He studied painting with former Bauhaus faculty Josef Albers and Lyonel Feininger, as well as Robert Motherwell. By the summer of 1948, Johnson had befriended summer visiting lecturers John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold and fellow student Ruth Asawa. He participated in “The Ruse of Medusa,” the culmination of Cage’s Satie Festival (characterized by scholar Martin Duberman as “a watershed event in the history of ‘mixed-media’”) with Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, the de Koonings, and Ruth Asawa, among others. In early 1949, Johnson moved to New York City and became an active participant in the downtown art scene. Alongside the American Abstract Artists group, Johnson painted geometric abstractions heavily influenced by the imagery of his former professor, Josef Albers. Johnson later destroyed most of this work, having turned to collage. By 1954, Johnson was making irregularly shaped “moticos,” his name for small-scale collages upon which he pasted images from popular culture such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple, and department store models. Johnson’s 1950s moticos anticipated Warhol’s 1960s Pop imagery. However, his attitude towards fame remained the antithesis of Warhol’s. He continually dodged it and was dubbed “the most famous unknown artist” by Grace Glueck in a 1965 New York Times article in which she discussed his deliberate elusiveness. Johnson carried boxes of moticos around New York, sharing them with strangers on sidewalks, in cafes, and even in Grand Central Station. He solicited and even occasionally recorded the public’s response to his intricate creations. After a number of performance-like installations of these works in 1954-55, Johnson claimed to have burned a plethora of them in Cy Twombly’s fireplace, a gesture that John Baldessari later replicated in his “Cremation.” In 1958, Johnson was already recognized as part of the nascent Pop generation. In a review of a Jasper Johns’ exhibition, a critic for ARTnews stated: “Johns’ first one-man show (...) places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson.” Around 1959, Johnson met Billy Linich (later known as Billy Name) at New York’s Serendipity, and in 1963 Johnson introduced him to Warhol. Billy Name became a key figure at Warhol’s Factory, responsible for covering the Factory walls with silver, which resulted from Johnson bringing Warhol to Name’s similarly silver-covered apartment. From the early 1960s onwards, Johnson would reuse his “moticos,” cutting them up to create tiny compositions that he glued onto small blocks of layered cardboard. He would then ink, paint, and sand these “tiles” or “tesserae,” using them in his extremely complex collages whose underlying structural emphasis on repetition and variations of semi-geometric forms relate to the eccentric minimalism of fellow artists Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse... Johnson incorporated meaningful texts into his work beginning in the 1950s – letters or fragments of words, names of celebrities, literary figures, and art-world denizens, both historical and current... Throughout the early stage of his career and spanning its duration, Johnson sought out the random and the ephemeral, incorporating chance operations into his artistic practice with “mail art.” He gradually built up an informal, hybrid network of friends, acquaintances, and strangers with whom he exchanged ideas and artworks by means of the postal system. By 1958, he began to write, “Please send to...” on his mailings, thereby creating even more sub-networks among the hundreds of correspondents in his greater mail art organization. By 1962, when it was named the “New York Correspondance [sic] School,” his virtual “school” of correspondents had become a network for a web of communication by mail that eventually spread across the nation and around the globe. Johnson was an early instigator of performance art, actively participating in events by James Waring and Susan Kaufman, among others, and staging his own starting in 1957 that included “Funeral Music for Elvis Presley” and “Lecture on Modern Music.” Johnson’s compositions were performed at The Living Theatre and during events such as the Fluxus “Yam Festival” of 1963. From 1961 on, Johnson periodically staged events he called “Nothings,” described to his friend William S. 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 Gallery, a venue in New York operated by George Maciunas and Almus Salcius. 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... On April 1, 1968, the first of the meeting of the New York Correspondance School was held at the Society of Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place in New York City. Johnson called two more meetings 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.” Until his death, Johnson continued to mail out an extraordinary quantity of material, including elements of chopped-up collages; drawings with instructions (“please add to and return...”); found objects; snakeskins; plastic forks; and annotated newspaper clippings, to name only a few... Richard Feigen was an early champion of his work, holding one-man exhibitions in New York and Chicago from 1966-72, including I Shot an Arrow into the Air It Fell to Earth in the Ear of an Artist Living in Flushing, New York Tit Show (1970) and Dollar Bills (1970). From 1968-1974, Johnson produced an ambitious body of work, received critical attention on the pages of Artforum, and was featured in several major exhibitions. In 1970, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized Ray Johnson: New York Correspondance School, which served as a major form of cultural validation for Johnson’s practice. Additionally, Johnson had several solo shows at Willard Gallery (New York) as well as Famous People’s Mother’s Potato Mashers (1973) at Galleria Schwarz (Milan) and Ray Johnson’s History of the Betty Parsons Gallery (1973) at the Betty Parsons Gallery (New York), and participated in the group exhibition Post Card Show (1971-72) at the Angela Flowers Gallery (London)... On April 5, 1973, Johnson declared the “death” of the “New York Correspondance School” in an unpublished letter to the Obituary Department of The New York Times but continued to practice mail art under this and other rubrics. In 1976, Johnson began his Silhouette project, which involved creating over 200 profiles of friends’, artists’, or famous peoples’ faces, which he would often use as the basis for collages. Subjects included “a who’s who of the New York arts and letters scene”: Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, Frances Beatty, William S. Burroughs, Nam June Paik, David Hockney, Peter Hujar, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Johnson continued to exhibit in many group exhibitions and held over forty performances and Corresponde(a)nce School events. In 1984, Works by Ray Johnson at the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY — the most comprehensive exhibition of Johnson’s work up until that time was curated by Phyllis Stigliano and Janice Parente. Johnson visited the exhibition but remained in the parking lot during the opening. A few months later, also in 1984, Johnson’s father, Eino Johnson died on July 15th. Prompting Johnson to go back to Detroit for a while to help his mother Lorraine. In 1988 Lorraine Johnson died and Johnson staged his last documented performance in conjunction with the Al Hansen exhibition at Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York, with Larry Poons and Vito Acconci. In 1991, More Works by Ray Johnson 1951-1991 opened at Goldie Paley Gallery in Philadelphia curated again by Stigliano and Parente. From 1992–1994, Johnson used 137 disposable cameras to create a large body of work that was not widely shown until 2022 at the Morgan Library & Museum in the exhibition Please Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson Photographs curated by Joel Smith. Staging his collages in settings near his home in Locust Valley, Long Island — parking lots, sidewalks, beaches, cemeteries — Johnson made photographs that pull the world of everyday “real life” into his art. In, as he put it, his “new career as a photographer,” Johnson began making collages in a new, larger format that made them more effective players in his camera tableaux. The vast archive he left behind at his death included over three thousand of the late photographs. On January 13, 1995, Johnson was seen dressed in black diving off a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and backstroking out to sea. Many aspects of his death involved the number “13”: the date, his age, 67 (6+7=13), as well as the room number of a motel he had checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7=13). There was much speculation amongst critics, scholars, admirers, and law-enforcement officials about a “last performance” aspect of Johnson’s drowning. After his death, hundreds of collages were found carefully arranged in his Long Island home. A retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1999), which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts as well as solo and group shows in the US and abroad, including Paris, London, Oslo, Budapest, and Barcelona, began the process of re-introducing Johnson’s work to a broader audience... Following Johnson’s suicide, filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter, with the support and oversight of Frances Beatty, Vice-President of Richard L. Feigen & Co. and Director of the Ray Johnson Estate, 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 2003. How To Draw a Bunny examines Johnson’s life, art, his ambivalent attitude towards fame, and finally his mysterious death. The film includes interviews with artists Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Billy Name, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the founder of The Living Theatre, Judith Malina, among many others. A decade after his death, the network of mail artists continues to grow, numbering in the thousands of general correspondents... Source: Ray Johnson Estate, “Biography,” URL: https://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/biography, Accessed: March 27, 2023.

Extent

2 Linear Feet (3 boxes, 2 oversize boxes)

Language of Materials

English

Abstract

The Ray Johnson Papers (1927-2006) span 2 linear feet, and consist of an assortment of Johnson's body of work, including drawings, collages, correspondence, and exhibition materials, as well as work by other members of the New York Correspondence School, including pieces created for Johnson.

Arrangement

Collection was maintained in the seller’s (Glenn Horowitz Bookseller) arrangement: Series 1. Drawings, Series 2. Collages, Series 3. Collage Elements, Series 4. Mail Art and Correspondence, Series 5. Book About Death, Series 6. Mimeograph Art, Series 7. New York Correspondence School, Series 9. Ed Plunkett, Series 10. Envelopes, Series 11. Exhibitions, Series 12. Press, Series 13. Reproductions, Series 14. Personal, and Series 15. Ruth Ford correspondence.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

This collection was a purchase by the Buddy Taub Foundation, via Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, and was accessioned in February, 2022 (Accession No. SPEC 2022-5).

Related Materials

See also the Carl Weissner Archive (MS22), the Dick Higgins Archive (MS132), and the Music Library's John Cage Notations Project collection and John Cage correspondence.

Title
Guide to the Ray Johnson Papers, 1927-2006
Author
Natalia Gutierrez-Jones
Date
2023 March
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Library Details

Part of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections Repository

Contact:
Deering Library, Level 3
1970 Campus Drive
Evanston IL 60208-2300 US
847-491-3635