Ray Johnson

A monograph on the collagist and mail-art pioneer Ray Johnson (1927–1995), presenting 42 collages made between 1966 and 1994, most never previously exhibited or published, with a new essay by the writer and biographer Brad Gooch.

Published by Matthew Marks Gallery in 2017, the clothbound volume reproduces Johnson's most expansive work in 87 plates: layered compositions of magazine clippings, photographs, and hand-worked elements that merge art history with celebrity, word with image, and the personal with the universal. Gooch's essay traces a practice delivering, in his words, "surprise and joy, excitement and entertainment," likening the collages to jokes sublimely told by a tortured stand-up comedian.

A Black Mountain College alumnus who turned from painting to collage after moving to New York in 1949, Johnson became a seminal Pop artist, a proto-conceptualist, and the founder of the New York Correspondance School, distributing his work through the postal service. By 1965 he was known as "New York's most famous unknown artist." The library also holds Ray Johnson c/o, the Art Institute of Chicago's 2021 survey of his correspondence art.