Pop artist Ray Johnson is best known for being unknown. A man who dons a placard and boycotts his own one-man show, who uses the postal service as performance art, and who creates complex collages with inconic references and inside jokes, Ray Johnson's art career entwined visual and conceptual art with theater. That's me with him in the second photo in 1984, at a 'cutting party' where he cut the layers of clothes off of people for artistic effect. He dropped hot dogs from helicopters, walked on a roof with a ladder, even his death, a suicide in the waters of Sag Harbor, had all the makings of a Ray Johnson performance.
One of Johnson's pieces was the creation of an unbound book called A Book About Death, where his postcard-sized images addressed the topic of death in his usual mix of truth and irony. To honor his legacy, artist and curator Matthew Rose and a band of fantastically creative folks have hosted A Book About Death postcard exhibitions around the globe, an open call for images borrowing Johnson's theme and format.
There is a new open call for work to be submitted for an upcoming ABAD exhibition at CW Post in Brookville, Long Island, a stone's throw from Ray Johnson's residence in Locust Valley. The deadline is October 15th, so you've got some time to break out your paints, your scissors, and your pencils and enter a work of your own. Click here for details.
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