Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
KARMA, NEW YORK
Ray Johnson
Pioneer of mail art and an early participant in both the Pop and Fluxus movements, Ray Johnson created complex, punning works that ingeniously combine text and image, celebrity culture and art history, wit and melancholy. Figures such as Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein models populate his many collages—a candid foreshadowing of current societal obsession. In the 20 years since his death, Johnson's work has become an increasingly accurate depiction of our fragmented and overstimulated society and includes some of the most recognizable imagery from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beautifully designed, this massive compendium includes 296 color reproductions of collages, drawings, interventions and other ephemera from Johnson's estate. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Ray Johnson (1927–1995) studied under Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and worked as a painter early in his career, exhibiting alongside Ad Reinhardt and Charmion von Wiegand before embracing pop imagery, collage and mail art, producing thousands of collages and other works on paper. His life and death (by suicide, jumping from a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island) were the subject of the award-winning documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002).
Featured image is reproduced from Ray Johnson.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Art in America
David Ebony
In this compendium, which brings together scores of Johnson's witty collages and drawings, often incorporating iconic figures from the 20th century, as well as other ephemera from Johnson's estate, the artist is revealed to be a pioneer of both Pop and Fluxus aesthetics.
Featured image is reproduced from Ray Johnson, Karma's indispensible, copiously illustrated and beautifully designed book on the influential artist who heralded Pop, Conceptual and mail art and took his own life as his final artwork in 1995. In a major New York Times feature this weekend, Randy Kennedy quotes Karma's Brendan Dugan, who organized an exhibition of Johnson's late work in the fall: "'He kind of landed by default in the book and ephemera world, and to a large extent that's really where his work has been living." Mr. Dugan said he had been drawn to Mr. Johnson in part because of his avid following among younger, punk-influenced artists but also those whose work seems to have little affinity with Mr. Johnson's… For the show at Karma, Mr. Dugan was allowed to pore over reams of paper works in the L. Feigen & Co. archive, made by Mr. Johnson mostly in the last decade of his life, 'and what I saw was a total discovery to me, because a lot of it was very raw and very punk,' he said. 'Here was this guy in his 60s, and he's still up to it, to the very end, pulling in new material from the culture and making this very weird stuff that feels very contemporary now.'" continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 12.25 in. / 296 pgs / 296 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $55 ISBN: 9781938560828 PUBLISHER: Karma, New York AVAILABLE: 1/27/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Pioneer of mail art and an early participant in both the Pop and Fluxus movements, Ray Johnson created complex, punning works that ingeniously combine text and image, celebrity culture and art history, wit and melancholy. Figures such as Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein models populate his many collages—a candid foreshadowing of current societal obsession. In the 20 years since his death, Johnson's work has become an increasingly accurate depiction of our fragmented and overstimulated society and includes some of the most recognizable imagery from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beautifully designed, this massive compendium includes 296 color reproductions of collages, drawings, interventions and other ephemera from Johnson's estate.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Ray Johnson (1927–1995) studied under Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and worked as a painter early in his career, exhibiting alongside Ad Reinhardt and Charmion von Wiegand before embracing pop imagery, collage and mail art, producing thousands of collages and other works on paper. His life and death (by suicide, jumping from a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island) were the subject of the award-winning documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002).
