February 22, 2018
10–11 a.m.
Ray Johnson Estate
34 East 69th Street, NYC
Free for AFA Members
$20 General Admission
Join us for an intimate tour of the Ray Johnson Estate with its Managing Director, Frances Beatty, and Maria Ilario, Director of Collections and Archives.
With examples of Johnson’s works and personal files, visitors will learn about the life and work of Ray Johnson (1927-1995), an American artist known primarily for his collages and correspondence art and for his participation in Neo-Dada and early Pop art.
Johnson attended the progressive Black Mountain College during the tenures of Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Motherwell, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, among other notable artists. He moved to New York in 1949, where he befriended artists including Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yoko Ono, and began creating a series of collages he called “moticos” that incorporated fragments from popular culture that he would randomly exhibit in public spaces across the city, and later mail to friends and acquaintances. He is widely considered to be the founder of mail art and is best known for his New York Correspondance School, a mail art network that was the subject of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, and is still active today.
