Portrait of Ray Johnson circa mid-1960s by Bill Wilson.
The Book Beat annual Ray Johnson birthday celebration and meeting will be held October 16 from 7-8:30 PM online via Zoom. We will discuss the long friendship and correspondence between artist Ray Johnson and Bill Wilson with special guest John Walter, director of How to Draw a Bunny who will share with us his archive of Bill Wilson letters. Art Institute of Chicago Art curator Caitlin Haskell can’t make it this year but she has offered Elio Canale-Parola and Jessica Smith “who could potentially speak in my absence.”
If you’ve signed up for a Ray Johnson meetings in the past you’re likely on our list and will receive a Zoom link by email on the afternoon of Oct. 16. If you’re unsure and would like to attend, please send us your name and email.
Once described as New York’s “most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a renowned and prolific maker of collages and a pioneering figure in the worlds of Pop, Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and performance. The founder and impresario of the first international mail art network, the New York Correspondence School (NYCS), established in 1962, Johnson treated social interactions, whether live or conducted via the postal service, as a type of artistic endeavor. (Bio from the Chicago Institute of Art.)
In the field of documentary, John Walter has emerged as the medium’s most eloquent and entertaining cultural historian. The Detroit-born director, who is also an unpublished poet, began his career in the film industry as a boom operator and worked in that capacity on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II.In 2002, Walter made his documentary feature debut with How to Draw a Bunny, a portrait of the Pop Art collage artist and prankster Ray Johnson, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Documentary.
Elio Canale-Parola is the Ray Johnson Project Cataloger in the Art Institute of Chicago Archives. Reporting to the archivist and director of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives, they conduct and assist with the cataloging of the William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson, and work on a variety of research, description, and inventory tasks.
Jessica Smith is the associate director of archives at the Chicago Institute of Arts.