Untitled (Taoist Collages)

In December 1955 Ray Johnson mailed this group of 30 collages to Sybil Shearer, a dancer and choreographer then living in Northbrook, Illinois. The two artists met in 1949, introduced to one another by Johnson’s romantic partner, sculptor Richard Lippold, then serving as an editor of the journal Dance Observer. “I was taken with her—,” Johnson wrote after visiting Shearer in Northbrook that summer. “Respected her so much because she seemed such a complete artist in every way. Completely in her art.” Johnson looked to Shearer not just as a model of artistic devotion, but also as a stimulus to his growing excitement about the world of dance and theater—interests that informed the works’ making as well as Johnson’s decision to set these collages in motion, sending them into the word via the mail and giving them social currency.

No two collages in the group are identical. Several feature recognizable figures, ranging from William Shakespeare to Marlon Brando. Nearly all feature fragments of handwritten text taken from the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, which Johnson may have discovered at Orientalia, the East Asian bookstore where he worked in these years. Johnson, who was broadly interested in East Asian religion, referred to these works as “Taoist collages.”