Day Thirteen- Ray Johnson- Not Nothing

Today is Day Thirteen and I am honoring an artist who died on January 13, 1995 today. My best friend Karli recommended this artist and he is awesome. There is such an interesting story behind this artist. I will be including an excerpt from his biography from wikipedia. Please click on link to learn more about him. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you…

Ray Johnson!

Raymond Edward “Ray” Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995), known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art. Once called “New York’s most famous unknown artist”, Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events associated with the Fluxus movement and was the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School – which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long island and remained there until his suicide.

In the documentary How To Draw A Bunny, Richard Lippold delicately but candidly confesses to carrying on a love affair with Johnson for many years which began at Black Mountain College.

“I risk to say,[that at Black Mountain College ]’anything went’–between the students and the faculty…As I said to my wife the other day, ‘I think I’m a good old man now, but I was a very bad boy.’… She agreed. We had a little house, my family and me, and he would arrive every morning with a little bouquet of wild flowers, and singing. Eventually our relationship became very intimate, so I brought him back to New York…and obviously, we didn’t live together, steadily, because I had my family. We were quite close together until 1974, so that’s a long period of time. From ’48 to ’74, twenty some years. Because it was a very intimate relationship, a loving relationship. And it would be very hard for me to separate him as a person from his work. I don’t think I could do that.”