Rex Ray

Early life and education Born as Michael Patterson on September 11, 1956, on a United States Army base near Landstuhl, Germany, and he was raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

He moved to San Francisco in 1981 to attend San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) where he studied with Sam Tchakalian, Kathy Acker, and Angela Davis before earning his BFA in 1989.

By the early 1990s he started a professional fine art practice. He had two units in the Allied Box Factory building in the Mission District in San Francisco, one was his living space and the other was his art studio.

Ray referred to his artwork as "paintings" even though they were often collage-based and lacked any traditional painting techniques. His source material was made with woodblock printing on colored paper. The sheets of printed paper were adhered to a canvas with a wet glue. As the glue got tacky, Ray would cut patterns into the papers, removing the extraneous paper, leaving the hand cut shapes to dry. Hi s large-scale canvases would require weeks of intensive labor and were composed of dozens of layers of cut, painted paper.

In 2008, Ray illustrated 10,000 Dresses, written by Marcus Ewert. The illustrations for the book were created using his cut-paper collage methods. The book was a 2010 Stonewall Honor Book in Children and Young Adult Literature, a 2009 American Library Association Rainbow Book and was a finalist for the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature. Despite these being honored with these awards, 10,000 Dresses experienced mixed opinions on whether or not it was appropriate to teach to its intended audience of young children.

Ray died February 9, 2015, in San Francisco after a five year battle with lymphoma. In 2024, SFMoMA featured many of Ray's poster designs in Art of Noise, an exhibition celebrating groundbreaking design shaping our music experience.

His work is also in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Archival collections of Ray’s work are preserved by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

In September 2027, a retrospective of title Rex Ray: We Are All Made of Light will held at the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California. The exhibition was curated by Griff Williams and Cydney Payton.

Publications

Williams, Griff (2020) The Art of Rex Ray. (essays by Rebecca Solnit and Christian Frock). San Francisco: Chronicle Books.