Ray Johnson created a chain of works that blurred the lines of life and art, real and abstract, during his fifty-year career. His many sculptures, collages, books, performances, photographs, etc., were threads of a complex web of events that represented life’s lived experiences. While his main medium was collage, he, along with his works, were resistant to any categorization. Johnson liked to focus on the elements of every day life and nothing was unworthy of his commentary. The way he experienced the world was most accurately portrayed by collage. These collages were displays of endless juxtapositions of the material world and life being lived during the time they were made. They were pictorial expressions of meaningful moments in life.
Going beyond cubism and surrealism, Johnson created a network of art and people becoming intertwined. He used his collages paired with correspondence to track the delicacy of human communication, the poetics of exchange, and the relationship between an artist and his audience. These collages became more than just a structural system, they became a paradigm for communication. As a teenager he began mailing these collages to a childhood friend. He would combine writing about local neighborhood news and other prominent things in his life with illustrations and found images to communicate important information. It was apparent in these collage correspondences that he was aware that combining these two forms were more powerful than using just one on its own.
While studying at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, under the artist Josef Albers, he was trained to analyze and apply color and form as expressive properties. During this time, Johnson created a series of paintings experimenting with formal arrangements of pattern and colors. The paintings were very geometrical and made great use of a grid structure. These painting also harbored inspiration from Johnson’s good friend Richard Lippold, a sculptor, who was an artist-in-residence at Black Mountain College during the time Johnson attended classes there. They went on to share an apartment together across the hall from Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Cage had ideas about chance and indeterminacy that also heavily influenced Johnson’s work. While Johnson gained great discipline and control over his materials, Cage’s ideas opened up a window to spontaneity and randomness as valid aesthetic processes. 
During the early 1950’s, Johnson started making irregularly shaped works that went against the grid structure of his earlier paintings. He, in fact, destroyed his older paintings, instead using pieces of them in his collages. It was during this time that he also began creating and mailing postcards made of found images and text from magazines and comic strips. By this time, many other artists in the United States as well as Europe began to gravitate towards collage and assemblage. They were seen as a counter-response to abstract expressionism. Collage worked to reintroduce images in a way that also had them function as formal elements. Collage was also a way to reconnect with the stuff and actions of everyday life without resorting to a narrative associated with representational painting. While collage grew in popularity, Johnson’s work still managed to remain distinctive. While many comparisons can be drawn between the collages of Johnson and the collages of Rauschenberg, one main difference was that Rauschenberg created with the context of the gallery in mind. Johnson, however, had been described as “the master of collage on a portable scale.” Where Rauschenberg introduced life into art, Johnson introduced art into life. 
