Please Send To: Ray Johnson, Selections from the Permanent Collection
Woodhouse Gallery
Curated by Jess Frost, Associate Curator/Registrar of the Permanent Collection

Drawn from Guild Hall’s permanent collection, Please Send To: Ray Johnson features over 30 works by the famously reclusive artist, the majority of which are classified as Mail Art, a movement pioneered by Johnson in the 1950s. The artist sent small, mixed-media works to a network of fellow artists through the post, instructing them to intervene in the original work or forward the materials to another person. Mail Art offered Johnson alternative modes of circulating ideas and gaining recognition, and one could argue that these subversive methods anticipated the digital dissemination of images through platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

The cryptic arrangements of notes, doodles, newspaper clippings and rubber stamped texts in these works offer great insights into the shifting social dynamics of this fertile period in American art. As viewers try to decode the visual information presented, they are drawn into Johnson’s complex observations about his immediate art orbit and society at large. Despite regular exhibitions with Feigen Gallery and a 1970 show of his Mail Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist remained wary of the public eye. When he retreated to a suburb on Long Island, limiting his communications to the telephone and post, his work became increasingly populated by narratives surrounding the celebrities and members of the art scene he had vacated.

In January of 1995, Johnson ended his life by jumping off the Sag Harbor – North Haven Bridge, a mysterious gesture that was true to his life’s work. This final performance was orchestrated to include a legacy in the form of thousands of works, carefully arranged in his otherwise empty home in Locust Valley. In Johnson’s absence, his works became more readily available for public consumption, and historians began to recognize these works as early examples of Pop art and Conceptual art.

This extensive and important cache of material entered Guild Hall’s Permanent Collection through the Tito Spiga Bequest, for whom one of the museum’s galleries is named. As with all of the museum’s holdings, the works reveal the rich culture and relationships to the region, and the museum’s commitment to preserving that history.

Moran Gallery

Private Member Reception – October 20, 2018
Gallery Talk with Mike Solomon – October 21, 2018
Lecture with Gail Levin, Ph.D – Novermber 3, 2018

The late painter Syd Solomon once described himself as an “Abstract Impressionist” alluding to the fact that his work infused Impressionism into the processes, scale and concepts of Abstract Expressionism. While his paintings have often been framed as an extension of Abstract Expressionism, a current cataloging project of Solomon’s archives has revealed new information about the singular artist and his milieu. The exhibition Concealed and Revealed, coming to Guild Hall in October 2018, is the first to examine Solomon’s work through the lens of his personal archive. For example, the artist worked as a camoufleur (a person who designs and implements military camouflage) during WWII, but just how expert Solomon was in this field, and more significantly, how this exceptional skill came to inform the development of his painting techniques is just now being understood. After returning from the Western Front at the end of the war with five Bronze Stars, Solomon joined a coterie of artists whose wartime experience undoubtedly transformed their art.

Additionally, the archive uncovers that Solomon’s high school training in “technical arts” and lettering led to early work in advertising, creating signs and promotions for stores, ads for newspapers, magazines and brochures, and political campaigns. Like his close colleague James Brooks, the influence of typography becomes a significant factor in his latter brushwork, calligraphy, handwriting and other gestural aspects of his paintings.

These discoveries and more allow us to see Solomon’s achievements in a new and more accurate way, leading us to understand layers of his work not previously or totally appreciated. Concealed and Revealed is presented in partnership with the Estate of Syd Solomon and accompanied by a 96-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Michael Auping, George S. Bolge, Gail Levin, and the artist’s son Mike Solomon.

This exhibition is organized by the Estate of Syd Solomon