Make room for Ray Johnson whose place in history has been only vaguely defined. Johnson's beguiling, challenging art has an exquisite clarity and emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too.

A seminal Pop Art figure, Ray Johnson has been called the most significant "unknown artist" of the post-war period, a "collagist extraordinaire" who influenced both the Pop artists and a generation of contemporary artists besides. Until his suicide by drowning in January, 1995, he was known primarily to a close circle of friends, admirers, and collectors that included Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Christo and Jeanne Claude, Chuck Close, and Robert Rauschenberg. To the larger public Johnson remained a cipher, shunning publicity and refusing for the last 25 years of his life to exhibit his work. Since his death, however, he has been rediscovered - with a retrospective at the Wexner Center that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and over 40 solo and group shows in the US and abroad, including Paris, London, Oslo, and Budapest. Johnson has emerged not only as a key member of the 1960's generation, but as one of the major artistic innovators of the second-half of the 20th century.

Born in Detroit in 1927, Johnson attended Black Mountain College in the late 1940's, where he studied painting with Josef and Anni Albers. He studied with and worked alongside Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Richard Lippold, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. In 1948 he moved to New York and became active in the downtown art scene. By 1954, frustrated with painting and searching for a new mode of expression, he cut up his abstract canvases, and began to make collages. Soon he was also cutting up his collages, and then combining the fragments with images from popular culture in successively newer collages. He collaged pictures of Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, and others in a manner that anticipated Warhol's images of the 1960's. Among his earliest collages were the irregularly shaped "moticos" panels, his critique of the abstract rules of the rectangle. In keeping with themes and practices that run throughout his life and art, he reused moticos cut into home-made "tesserrae," small, highly-worked blocks of intricately layered paper that he painted and sandpapered. As Johnson liked to rhyme later, he didn't make Pop Art, he made Chop Art.

Johnson often linked images and ideas to generate new meaning from novel juxtapositions of shape and form. His work reflected an intense interest in Zen Buddhism, which he practiced in his own way, and in John Cage's ideas about chance operations in the artistic process. In his mailings, he introduced chance by inviting a recipient of his mailings to send the material to another person. After Marcel Duchamp, he was perhaps the first artist to incorporate instructions for active participation in the artwork into the artwork itself. His interest in codes, poetics, and semiotic systems looked back to Duchamp, while anticipating the enlarging contemporary practice of appropriation of other art.

In the 1950s, while continuing with collage, Johnson began exploring the possibilities of "mail art." He gradually built up a fluid and informal network of friends, acquaintances, and virtual strangers with whom he exchanged ideas and artworks. By July, 1962, he began to write "Please send to..." on his mailings. Soon called the "New York Correspondance (sic) School," his network of correspondents became the unofficial clearing house for a web of communication by mail that eventually spread across the nation and around the globe. He mailed an enormous quantity of material, including elements of chopped-up collage; drawings with instructions ("please add to and return..."); found objects; snake skins; plastic forks; and annotated newspaper clippings. In 1966, Richard Feigen gave Ray Johnson his first one-man show in Chicago, and in 1968 exhibited his work in New York City.

On June 3, 1968, the day Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas (with a gun stolen from under the bed of Johnson's friend, the artist May Wilson) Johnson was attacked in lower Manhattan. This prompted his abrupt departure to Glen Cove, and then to Locust Valley, Long Island, where he lived in ever greater reclusiveness in what he called a "small white farmhouse with a Joseph Cornell attic."

As his contemporaries became famous, Johnson receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider while maintaining his profile by communicating via mail art and the telephone. He parodied celebrity in performances, fake openings, photocopy-machine art, lists of famous names next to obscure names, and rubber-stamped signatures such as "Collage by Joseph Cornell," or "Collage by Sherrie Levine." Johnson, referring to himself as a "mysterious and secret organization," achieved legendary status as the conscience of artists. This underground reputation prospered well into the 1980's, despite his general absence from the scene, and the gallery-going public's sketchy notions of his output.

In addition to his work in collage, Johnson was also one of the first performance artists. In 1961 he initiated his "Nothings," performances conceived in response to the work of Allan Kaprow and Fluxus, and continued to stage them throughout his life. Indeed, given the carefully wrought circumstances of his suicide on Friday the 13th, 1995 -- the attention to detail like the number 13 - the way images in his life overlap images in his death has suggested drowning as his "final performance."

Johnson's suicide became the first opportunity to examine his work of the previous fifty years. Stored in an eerie construction of boxes inside his house, the work was as precisely stacked as a large three-dimensional collage. With the help of Frances Beatty, Vice-President of Richard L. Feigen & Co., filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter spent the next six years probing the mysteries of Johnson's life and art. Their collaboration yielded the award-winning documentary, How To Draw a Bunny, released in 2003. The film examines Johnson's life, art, and ambivalent attitude toward fame. Since he was not ambivalent about friendship, the film appropriately includes interviews with friends such as artists Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Billy Name, Peter Shuyf, and the founder of The Living Theatre, Judith Malina. A decade after his death, his network continues to develop with the participation of thousands of mail-artists. Although Johnson's death left many questions unanswered, his life's work is evidence of a powerful and original sensibility unique in the history of modern art.