Ray Johnson - Locust Valley Years

Locust Valley Years

From 1966 into the mid-1970s, Johnson’s work was shown at the Willard Gallery (New York) and Feigen Gallery (Chicago and New York), as well as by Angela Flowers in London and Arturo Schwarz in Milan. In 1970, mail from 107 participants to curator Marcia Tucker was exhibited in a Ray Johnson - New York Correspondence School exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - a significant moment of cultural validation for Johnson. Another notable exhibition followed - Correspondence: An Exhibition of the Letters of Ray Johnson at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, 1976, organized by Richard Craven: 81 lenders’ works, 35 years of Johnson’s outgoing mail. Around that time, Johnson began his silhouette project, creating approximately 200 profiles of personal friends, artists, and celebrities which became the basis for many of his later collages. His subjects included Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Edward Albee, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Lynda Benglis, Nam Jume Paik, David Hockney, David Bowie, Christo, Peter Hujar, Roy Lichtenstein, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, among others - a who's who of the New York arts and letters scene.

During the 1980s Johnson purposefully receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider, maintaining personal connections via mail art and telephone largely in place of physical interaction. Only a handful of people were ever allowed into his house in Locust Valley. Eventually, Johnson ceased to exhibit or sell his work commercially altogether. His underground reputation bubbled beneath the surface into the 1980s and 90s despite his general absence from the flourishing New York art scene. Johnson feverishly continued to work on richer and more complex collages. In contrast to his physical seclusion, Johnson's pre-digital network of correspondents increased in size exponentially.