Ray Johnson was a collagist but is best known as the progenitor of mail art with his New York Correspondence School, which he started in the l950s but which bloomed in the early 1960s.

Johnson was born in Michigan and went to Black Mountain College from l946 to l949, where he studied under Josef Albers. When he left to move to New York, he met painter/photographer Norman Solomon, with whom he started walking the streets at night, collecting bits and pieces from the streets.

Norman used his collections to nail to the walls as collages; Ray used his to cut up and mail to his friends. And soon he was asking his friends to mail items to other friends by writing "Please send to". Some of the mailings were forwarded, some were returned and some discarded.

Through these means he was able to build up a whole network of artists adding to his original mailings and forwarding them to one another.

In l970 the Whitney Museum showed the first exhibition of Johnson's mailings to and from the New York Correspondence School. It was called Correspon-dance because the exercise was like a dance, backwards and forwards between the participants.

By the mid-l970s Ray's mailart had caught on and become an art movement apart from his original "dance" and had spread to other countries, continents and artists with their own spin on the original idea of correspondancing.

The movement continued to spin, sometimes out of control, and Ray Johnson became somewhat of a recluse in upper New York State where, on January 13th, l995, he mailed his body off the Sag Harbor Bridge as his last contribution to mailart. The police designated this act as a suicide, but in actual fact it was a mailing.

Submitted November 2003 by Marie Tavroges Stilkind.

She writes: "I was the first "secretary" of the New York Correspondence School. My help in starting the school was only with mailing out the envelopes that Ray would bring over to my apartment or to where I worked at Juilliard School of Music. He had been mailing back and forth for several years before I met him, but gave it the name, suggested by the artist E.M. Plunkett, in the early spring of l962.

I had heard of Ray before I met him as I too went to Black Mountain College at the same time as Norman Solomon, who was really instrumental in encouraging Ray Johnson with the mailings. Ray and I remained friends for many years even after I left New York.

Besides being a gifted and creative artist, he was a kind and good friend. In actuality, his life was a work of art.

Most of the original artists and participants of the mail art movement are dead. Ray became associated with the Fluxus movement but was not an active member.

RAY EDWARD JOHNSON (1927-1995)

Considered both a Pop artist and an exemplar of the multi-disciplinary, anti-intellectual Fluxus movement, Ray Johnson has been labeled an enigmatic prankster and a pioneering genius. His origins and childhood in working-class Detroit, Michigan, were ordinary enough. He attended an occupational high school where he focused on commercial art, took classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and spent a summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. In the summer of 1945, he headed east to study at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where he spent the next three years (with the exception of spring 1946 when he was in New York studying at the Art Students League). Among his instructors at the experimental college was Josef Albers whose courses on art materials proved highly influential. In addition, Johnson befriended many avant-garde artists, including fellow student Robert Rauschenberg, and teachers Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, all of whom emphasized various forms of improvisation.

In early 1949, Johnson moved to New York. There, he joined the American Abstract Artists group and painted geometric abstractions that reflect the teachings of Albers and Ilya Bolotowosky, another faculty member at Black Mountain. Four years later, however, Johnson abandoned this direction and took up collage, building layered compositions from fragments of popular culture such as celebrity photos and cigarette packaging. He coined the term “moticos” (the anagram for osmotic) for his small collages, which he mailed to friends with the instructions to “please add to and send to” additional recipients. He also displayed his work on the streets of New York, trying to engage puzzled passersby. When one client asked for a twenty-five percent discount, Johnson obliged and delivered the piece with a quarter cut off. Between 1957 and 1963, Johnson participated in various performance events, often titled “Nothings.”

Unnerved after being mugged at knifepoint and shaken by the death of Robert Kennedy, in 1968 Johnson moved to Glen Cove on Long Island and began a reclusive existence. Though physically removed from the modern art scene, he maintained personal and cultural connections through his mail art, over one hundred examples of which were featured in a 1970 exhibition, The New York Correspondance [sic] School, at the Whitney Museum of Art. Johnson’s suicide at age sixty-seven—he dove off a bridge in Sag Harbor into frigid waters—has been interpreted as his last piece of performance art. Johnson’s work is represented in leading museums, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art.

The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
thejohnsoncollection.org