Author Description

"Sometime in the late 1950s, Ray Johnson destroyed a cache of his earlier work: paintings, some collages, even his class notes from Black Mountain College, the experimental liberal arts school outside Asheville, North Carolina, which he had attended a decade prior. [...] This exhibition at Craig Starr Gallery presents a collection of early work by Ray Johnson that survived his ritual purge. Positioning rarely seen abstract paintings alongside intricate pasted-paper collages, this focused presentation demonstrates that painting and collage were not separate phases in Johnson's oeuvre but rather were coterminous practices, or, to use the artist's preferred term, they were in correspondence"--Page [3], Johanna Gosse.