Ray Johnson, father of MAIL ART!

article on Ray Johnson
In the early ’60s, Johnson turned his back on convention and gave his art away to anyone who interested him, via something he called the New York Correspondence School. He set up the tongue-in-cheek institution, infuriating dealers and delighting the friends and acquaintances who received the works. By sending his pieces through the mail, he created an international network of collectors and shattered boundaries in the art world, meanwhile remaining its best-kept secret.

“Johnson formed a complex, ‘pre-digital’ creative network,” notes Donna De Salvo, curator for the Whitney show and curator at large at the Wexner Arts Center at Ohio State University. Indeed, before there was an Internet, there was “Mail art, ” an unorthodox movement, currently in its fourth decade, that hails Johnson as its “Grand-dada.”

“Johnson’s mail-away art can’t be bought or sold but only received,” the late critic David Bourdon once remarked.