Mail Art to Lucy Lippard

Mail Art to Lucy Lippard

Correspondence Art

Lucy Lippard stated that she was “roped into” mail art in the late 1960s when Johnson sent out a mandate for NYCS members to “Send Slips to Lucy Lippard.” Johnson sent her several mail art items during their correspondence, including Mail art to Lucy R. Lippard. Ray Johnson’s Mail Art to Lucy R. Lippard demonstrates the ephemerality and transformative nature of mail art and the New York Correspondence School. The object consists of three sheets of paper: the first, a portrait of Ray Johnson, photocopied in black and white, with an inscription typed on his right cheek. The second, a typed letter to the “Deaths” department of the New York Times from the Buddha University (one of the multiple names Johnson used for the NYCS). The third is a handwritten note, stating the death of the New York Correspondence School, in large, loopy scrawl, also attributed to the Buddha University. Johnson’s work has been called a “playful postal dance;” that a “communication from Johnson seemed at once personal and abstract, everything and nothing.” This work, specifically the letter to the Times, illustrates Johnson’s ability to pack a lot of information into small amount of medium.

Ray Johnson

Archives of American Art
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/ray-johnson-mail-art-to-lucy-r-lippard-13544

Archives of American Art

1965

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Ray Johnson Estate, New York

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Photograph & Illustrated Letter

English

Mail Art

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