Ray Johnson’s Pedagogical Mail Art: The Open Curriculum of the New York Correspondence School

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Abstract: Initiated by the artist Ray Johnson, the New York Correspondence School is a community in which friends, acquaintances, and strangers send aestheticized mail, often called “mail art,” through the postal system. Critical of the larger commercialized art world, Johnson used educational themes in his mailings such as his brief histories, meeting seating charts, and how to draw instructions to reeducate his correspondents. His pedagogical mailings destabilized traditional concepts of art and socialization and turned forms of communication and education into artistic media in personal letters, mass-produced flyers, absurd packages, and everything in between. Johnson created a new model for network-based art experiences by encouraging collaboration and instructing his correspondents to add to or detach parts of his work and send them to other people. Johnson did not impose specific meanings on his work, instead each piece and in turn the whole network existed in constant flux, open to the indeterminacies, chance encounters, and free-associations inherent to both aesthetic and interpersonal experiences.

Sofia Kofodimos, 2015

All images (c) The Ray Johnson Estate at Richard L. Feigen & Co.