Early Years and Education
Born in Detroit, Michigan, on October 16, 1927, Ray Johnson grew up in a working-class neighborhood and attended an occupational high school where he was enrolled in the advertising art program. He took weekly classes at the Detroit Art Institute and spent a summer drawing at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan, affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago.
Johnson left Detroit after high school in the summer of 1945 to attend the radically progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he stayed for the next three years (spending the spring 1946 semester at the Art Students League in New York but returning the following summer). Josef Albers, before and after his notable sabbatical in Mexico, was in residence at Black Mountain College for six of the ten semesters that Johnson studied there. Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Robert Motherwell, Ossip Zadkine, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Ilya Bolotowski, Jacob Lawrence, Beaumont Newhall, M.C. Richards, and Jean Varda also taught at BMC during Johnson’s time there. Johnson decided on Albers’ advice to stay at BMC for a final term in summer 1948, when the visiting faculty included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold. Johnson took part in “The Ruse of Medusa” – the culmination of Cunningham’s Satie Festival - with Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Lippold, Ruth Asawa, Arthur Penn, and others among the cast and crew. “Because of those who participated, the event has taken on the reputation of a watershed event in ‘mixed media’…” wrote Martin Duberman in his history of BMC.
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