On Ray Johnson:
Ellen Levy and Bryan Barcena in Conversation
On the occasion of Los Angeles’s first solo exhibition of work by Ray Johnson, BLUM is pleased to present a conversation on Johnson with Ellen Levy and Bryan Barcena.
About Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson was a seminal pop art figure in the 1950s, early conceptualist, and mail-art pioneer. Johnson's preferred medium was collage, that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased (as the century wore on) collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man. Johnson integrated texts and images drawn from a multiplicity of sources, from mass media to telephone conversations. An art history savant with an uncanny ability to recall and connect an encyclopedic wealth of information, Johnson made work that conveys the vast nature of the human experience as viewed through the pinhole of the artist’s own dynamic life.
About Ellen Levy
Ellen Levy is a scholar and journalist who writes on poetry, visual art, theater, and dance. Currently a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, she has also taught at Vanderbilt University and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her previous book, Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts was reviewed in Artforum by Prudence Peiffer, who described it as "something like the bag of chips at the intellectual cocktail party: It avoids glamour for crisp pithiness and it fuels the gathering of luminaries it serves, even as it leaves one hungry for more." Levy will release her next book this fall with MIT Press, entitled A Book About Ray, the first full-career survey of the idiosyncratic life and work of Ray Johnson.
About Bryan Barcena
Bryan Barcena is a curator, critic, editor, and writer based in Los Angeles. He serves as the West Coast Editor of Artforum and is Curator-at-Large at Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), an organization that focuses on working with artists to commission and place site-specific art across the urban landscape of southern California. In 2023 he founded Of Wit Editorial, an independent publication consulting service that specializes in producing exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, artist books, photography books, and other publications. From 2013 to 2022 he served as a Curator and Manager of Publications at museums and arts organizations including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA.