A Book about Ray

Included in the New York Times‘s Best Art Books of 2024

“An extra-special artist deserves an extra-special book, and that’s what Ray Johnson gets in Ellen Levy’s “A Book About Ray.” In the 1960s the art writer Grace Glueck called him “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” and he wore that distinction like a crown. Indeed, it shaped his life, which he conducted as a game of hide-and-seek — largely through the medium of “mail art” — with the art world and fame. For a long time the role of omniscient fugitive worked. But by the 1980s, he had pretty much lost his audience and moved to Long Island, where, on a cold day in 1995, he drowned himself, elusive — no goodbyes, no whys — to the end. Levy’s biography respects the mystery without fastening on it. Instead, she works on evoking the performative character of Johnson’s life in a biography that has a dancerly rhythm of feints and darts, goes off on tangents and doubles back, keeping her prose, like her subject, moving, changing. Like the life it records, the book is a brilliant turn in — highest compliment — a very Ray way.”
—The New York Times, Arts


“Levy renders the life of Ray Johnson, the idiosyncratic pioneer of ephemeral and mail art, drawing inspiration for the tone of this survey from his stimulating and fleet-footed work.”
—The New York Times Book Review


“Ellen Levy brings Johnson’s life and art into a cohesive if somewhat unorthodox form in her biography of the artist, A Book about Ray. Beginning with the premise that not all stories must be told chronologically, Levy approaches Johnson’s life in the form of a fugue, each chapter serving as a repository for variations on a theme, with stories and anecdotes that spiral out from a central examination of the elusive qualities of Johnson’s work…Levy allows her writing to follow Johnson’s conviction that the details of biography be used lightly, and only to invite something more complex and vital to emerge. More a curated archive of the artist’s words and works than formal biography, A Book about Ray captures the fleeting immediacy of Johnson’s work, processing the enormity of his complex practice yet resisting any urge to codify.”
—Brooklyn Rail

“A comprehensive survey with intelligent, thoughtful readings of key works, for both newcomers and those already familiar with Johnson’s art.”
—Library Journal

“By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms…Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy’s eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson’s elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was.”
—Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Beautifully and copiously illustrated, Levy’s book serves not only as a narrative of this intriguing, still mysterious life but also as a kind of archive of Johnson’s body of work: a treasure trove as surprising, multi-layered and erudite as its trickster subject.”
—e-flux

“Ellen Levy’s beautifully conceived textual deep dive in seven chapters (plus a coda) is a worthy testament to the notoriously elusive Ray Johnson. Constructed with care—from the choice of typeface to the display of ephemera—A Book About Ray takes its ‘elliptical path’ around Johnson’s journey, from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy’s ‘art story’ exegesis about Johnson’s work and life pops and crackles and almost sings its histories: Ray’s elaborate games, tongue-in-cheek missives, erratic gestures, and his subversive art of disappearance. This is a fine read packed with many encounters and art world cameos (from Ruth Asawa to Andy Warhol), and a vital portrait of the ‘famously unknown’ American original who turned the US Postal Service into an art medium.”
— Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store