Ray Johnson Monograph and the Matthew Marks Gallery

Description

This is the major Ray Johnson monograph published in conjunction with the Matthew Marks Gallery exhibition and produced in close coordination with the Ray Johnson Estate. Johnson is best known as the central figure behind “Mail Art,” but this book doesn’t treat him as a novelty footnote. It places the full range of his work on the table — collages, drawings, photographs, ephemera — and shows how wide his output actually was.

The book itself is well made. Heavy stock, clean layout, strong image reproduction, and a slipcase that keeps it from getting beaten up on a shelf. It’s a reference-style monograph rather than a slim exhibition catalog, and it works as a long-term studio library book for anyone interested in postwar American conceptual and correspondence-based art.

For anyone already interested in Ray Johnson, this monograph lays some of his greatest work out in one place.