Ellen Levy on Ray Johnson, in conversation with Deborah Solomon

Ellen Levy on Ray Johnson, in conversation with Deborah Solomon

Tuesday, October 22, 6:30 pm

the Skylight Room, the Graduate Center

365 5th Ave., New York, NY 10016

Ray Johnson (1927-1995), a.k.a. “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” was notorious for the elaborate games he played with the institutions of the art world, soliciting their attention even as he rejected their invitations. In A Book about Ray, Ellen Levy offers a comprehensive study of the artist who turned the business of career-making into a tongue-in-cheek performance, tracing his artistic development from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy describes Johnson’s practice as one that was constantly shifting—whether in tone, in its address to potential audiences, or among three primary artistic modes: collage, performance, and correspondence art.
A Book about Ray takes an elliptical path, circling around rather than trying to arrest in flight the elusive artist and his purposefully ephemeral art. By crafting the book in this way, Levy evokes Ray Johnson’s art in the moment of its making and draws readers into the artist’s world, while making them feel, from the beginning, that they somehow already know their way around that world. In exploring Johnson’s scene, readers will also encounter the artists who influenced him, like Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, and his friends and peers like Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The work of such figures will look forever different in light of Johnson’s subversive take on their shared aesthetic.

Ellen Levy's writings include Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford UP) and essays and reviews in such publication as Dissent, Genre, Modernism/Modernity, The Nation, Parkett, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has taught at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt University.

Deborah Solomon is an art critic, journalist and biographer. She writes frequently for the New York Times, and is currently at work on a full-scale biography of the artist Jasper Johns. Her books include Jackson Pollock: A Biography(1987); Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (1997); and American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (2013). In 2001, Solomon was awarded a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in the field of biography.Solomon has written for many publications, and her weekly interview column, “Questions For,” appeared in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011. She has served as an art critic for The Wall Street Journal and WNYC Public Radio.

Host or Publisher The Leon Levy Center for Biography