Th Thee for and Lai Book, about 1955
Ray Johnson. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Helen and Sam Zell. © Ray Johnson Estate, 2026.
Ray Johnson was a renowned maker of meticulous collages and a pioneering figure in the worlds of Pop, Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and performance in the 1960s. From live events to exchanges via the postal service, he treated social interactions as a type of artistic endeavor.
Join art historian Johanna Gosse to look closely at a collaged book, Th Thee for and Lai, which Johnson made for his friend Remy Charlip around 1955. Th Thee for and Lai references cinema and suggests how Johnson’s “moticos,” a term the artist coined to refer to small collage panels and books like this one, might be best understood as “moving pictures.” By playfully introducing processes of interactivity, movement, and fugitive connection, Th Thee for and Lai shows us how Johnson treated this and his other books, such as The Paper Snake (1965), as intrinsically social media.
Considering this unconventional work, Gosse explores how Johnson’s book making connects to the beginnings of his mail art and reflects on what these practices can tell us about social media networks today.
Learn more about the Art Institute’s Ray Johnson holdings and resources at the Art Institute of Chicago.
About the Speaker
Johanna Gosse is a London-based art historian, curator, and lecturer in Lens and Time-Based Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research examines postwar American art, media, and cultural politics. From 2023 to 2024, she was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at Oxford University, and she is currently developing a book based on her Terra lecture series on American art and ecology in the Vietnam War era.
Gosse’s writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Art Journal, Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, ASAP/J, and numerous exhibition catalogues. She co-edited Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s (Duke University Press, 2021) with Timothy Stott (Trinity College Dublin). In 2024, Johanna curated Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, and in 2027, she is co-curating the first retrospective for the American artist and filmmaker Marie Menken at the National Museum of Lithuania in Vilnius.
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