The Art Institute of Chicago, 2021
Purchase from the Art Institute Museum Shop.
Available to booksellers from Yale University Press.
Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a renowned maker of meticulous collages whose works influenced movements including Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Emerging from the interdisciplinary community of artists and poets at Black Mountain College, Johnson was extraordinarily adept at using social interaction as an artistic endeavor and founded a mail art network known as the New York Correspondence School.
Drawing on the vast holdings of Johnson’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago (almost all from the recently acquired William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson), this volume gives new shape to our understanding of his artistic practice and features hundreds of pieces that include artist’s books, collages, drawings, mail art, and performance documentation.
In keeping with Johnson’s democratic, rhizomatic, and antihierarchical ethos, this indispensable resource on the artist’s oeuvre contains 700 illustrations, many of them never before published, and twenty-one short essays by various contributors that allow readers to dip into and out of the book in a nonlinear manner. It has been designed by renowned Dutch designer Irma Boom.
Edited by Caitlin Haskell with Jordan Carter
With contributions by Jordan Carter, Colby Chamberlain, Jennifer R. Cohen, Johanna Gosse, Caitlin Haskell, Miriam Kienle, Brian T. Leahy, Ellen Levy, Solveig Nelson, Thea Liberty Nichols, and Michael von Uchtrup
376 pages, 9 × 12 in.
700 color ills.
Softcover $60 ($54 members)
ISBN: 978-0-300-25433-4
