Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a collagist, performance artist, and founder of the form known as mail art, which involves the circulation of variously altered missives through chains of correspondents. His mailing list and artworks alike are peppered with famous names—John Cage, James Dean, Willem de Kooning, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Robert Rauschenberg, Shirley Temple, Andy Warhol—along with those of the notorious and the obscure. An incessant mapper of social connections, Johnson has come to seem prophetic of our networked moment.
 
Ray Johnson leapt from mode to mode, spinning speed-of-light associations into dense webs of meaning.  His mail art runs the gamut from louche one-off jokes and ragged throwaways to complex constructions and haunting letter-poems, sometimes all in the space of one envelope. The collages are exquisitely crafted and composed, as befits a one-time star student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. The performances could be Zen-elegant or what-was-that bafflers.
 
Ray Johnson, always elusive, left Manhattan in 1968 for a house in the suburbs, where he lived in increasing isolation while remaining devoted to the daily practice of art-making. In January 1995, Johnson drowned himself in Long Island Sound, an act that, like virtually every other aspect of his life, was bound up with his art: those who came to clean out his house found he had turned it into an installation that carefully framed, if not explained, his final gesture.
 
Ray Johnson, a.k.a. “New York’s most famous unknown artist.” Like his friend Andy Warhol, he was acutely tuned in to the frequencies of fame and acutely aware of the way that fame-hunger has come to dominate our imaginary lives. Unlike Warhol, though, Johnson never turned his gaze away from fame’s underside.

Perpetually perched on the invisible wall that divides inside from out, Ray Johnson is an indispensable witness to his time, a timely figure for our own.