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"As far as pen pals go, Ray Johnson may have been the greatest, most generous of them all. Beginning in the 1950s, the artist and graphic designer began mailing his flyers, posters, and collages to notable figures in the art world, among them MoMA staff members, including curator Dorothy Miller. Of course, some of this correspondence was a form of self-promotion, publicizing his talents as a commercial illustrator in hopes of getting commissions (Johnson couldn't simply start a Tumblr and become an instant Internet star, after all). But a new show at MoMA's Cullman Education Building establishes just how groundbreaking Johnson's typography and print designs from the '50s and '60s were, and how even his smallest pamphlets carried tremendous weight during the early days of Pop Art.\n\nPinterestFacebookJohnson's design for the cover of the 1957 edition of Arthur Rimbaud's *Illuminations,* published by New Directions\n\nHaving attended Black Mountain College in the late '40s, Johnson became acquainted with some who would eventually become the torchbearers for experimental art in the 20th century\u2014among them John Cage, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg. As seen in MoMA's show, Johnson, too, experimented with language and the presentation of text, creating a new pictorial alphabet to demonstrate his point of view or including enigmatic, poetic lines in flyers advertising his graphic-design business (e.g., \"Strange devices resembling television antennae are mounted on roofs in Tibet to entangle passing ghosts\").\n\nPinterestFacebookA 1956 promotional flyer advertising Ray Johnson's graphic-design business, a dance performance by Merce Cunningham, three new books, and a Cy Twombly show\n\nAlso included are book covers Johnson crafted for small literary publishers and illustrations commissioned by magazines. An image from a 1958 New York Times Fashion Supplement, shows a model standing in front of a printed background that Johnson hand-lettered. And his design for New Directions' 1957 translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations was used in subsequent printings for decades\u2014a reminder of Johnson's lasting influence on contemporary graphic design.\n\nThrough September 29 at the Museum of Modern Art's Cullman Education Building, New York, NY; moma.org\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/ray-johnson-designs-moma-new-york>