Joe Ray

Joe Ray, New Eye, cast resin and plexiglas; 7" x 11" x 11", 1969.

Joe Ray (born 1944) is an American artist based in Los Angeles. His work has moved between abstraction and representation and mediums including painting, sculpture, performance art and photography. He began his career in the early 1960s and belonged to several notable art communities in Los Angeles, including the Light and Space movement; early cast-resin sculptors, including Larry Bell; Critic Catherine Wagley described Ray as "an artist far more committed to understanding all kinds of light and space (cosmic, psychic, spiritual, and geographical) than to any specific material or strategy"—a tendency that she and others have suggested led to his being under-recognized. His artwork belongs to the public collections of LACMA and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.

Early life and career Ray was born in 1944 in Alexandria, Louisiana. In 1963, he traveled to Los Angeles by bus and soon joined its diverse, still-undefined art scene. After receiving a Young Talent Award from LACMA in 1970, Between 1978 and 1980, he was one of fifteen original members of the MOCA Los Angeles Artists Advisory Council, alongside Vija Celmins, Robert Irwin and others. "The Artist's Museum" (MOCA LA, 2010), In 2017, a 50-year survey of his work, "Complexion Constellation," took place at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles. Rather than present their individual resin sculpture, they chose to experiment as a trio with conceptual ideas and photography exploring popular clichés about contemporary artists—as dandy, outsider, libertine or romantic—titling the result, "The Fantasy Show." Their images included a tacky, Buñuel-like black-tie banquet for three; a scruffy, shirtless biker scenario spoofing machismo; and a poker game with Ray and three women, referencing the famed 1963 Duchamp photograph of himself playing chess in the Pasadena Art Museum.

Painting In the late 1970s, Ray's interest in the phenomenological qualities of resin led him to contemplations of the night sky, whose qualities—remote depth of color, refraction of space, dark air and white light—similarly combined science, imagination and emotional expressiveness. He explored these concerns in the "Nebula Paintings," a series of celestial landscapes employing acrylics, spray paint and mixed media that he has continued to produce into the 2020s. His earlier Nebula paintings combined colorful gestural and atmospherics with a careful use of pointed terms that reflected the context of their making; for example, the painting In Space (1980) bears ghostly text reading "race" and "complexion constellation." Critics have described his later "Nebula" works as more vibrant and hypnotic works that "conflate the properties of post-Impressionism and actionist Ab Ex, the emotional allegory of literally nebulous abstraction, and the cosmic bent of space-travel science" (e.g., Flaming Star Nebula #1, 2017; Red Yellow Black White and Burnt Sienna, 2020).

Joe Ray, US, acrylic on canvas, cotton fabric, on panel; 48" × 72", 1993. Collection of LACMA. In the 1990s, Ray created assemblage-paintings that probed issues of identity, racial justice and inclusion through a fluid use of imagery—as symbols and formal elements—that subverted negative stereotypes and racial epithets. One year after the Los Angeles riots sparked by the Rodney King police brutality case and acquittal, he completed a series including the works US and Blue Spade (both 1993); the former work's title refers to both the United States and the contradictions of the pronoun "us," which can function inclusively or divisively, as in "us vs. them." The series juxtaposed symbols of freedom and equality and repression and protest: a gazelle mask symbolizing the African continent; kente cloth, a Ghanaian textile with significance to the West African diaspora that he used in place of an American flag's traditional blue field; flowers seemingly growing out of concrete; splashes of black paint suggesting stained urban sidewalks, anger or Abstract Expressionism; a whip painted white, a blood-red cross, and spade forms evoking a racial slur, card games and a tool.

In 2014, the series was presented at Prospect.3 in New Orleans, in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting; In a The New Orleans Times-Picayune review, Doug McCash wrote, "Encountering Ray's paintings and reading their backstory in the fall of 2014 was a chilling experience that emphasized art's power to mark a moment ... or moments."