Joe Ray (artist) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joe Ray
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| Born | 1944 Beaumont, Texas, United States
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| Nationality | American |
| Education | California Institute of the Arts, University of Southwestern Louisiana |
| Known for | Painting, cast-resin sculpture, photography, performance art |
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; and the influential 1970s African-American collective, Studio Z, of which he was a founding member with artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Houston Conwill. 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.
Ray has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Museum of African-American Art in Los Angeles, among other venues. 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 Beaumont, Texas in 1944 and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana. After taking high school courses in industrial metalwork, art and music, he studied fine arts at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, one of only a few black students in the previously segregated college. In 1963, he traveled to Los Angeles by bus and soon joined its diverse, still-undefined art scene. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to serve in Vietnam in 1965, two weeks after the Watts Rebellion. When he returned from Vietnam in 1967, Ray settled in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, a burgeoning center of historical and contemporary African-American culture, and began experimenting with resin-based sculpture alongside others such as Larry Bell, Doug Edge and Terry O'Shea.
Ray first showed his artwork in the 1969 4th Annual Watts Summer Festival Art Exhibition, and subsequently received recognition through group exhibitions at SFMOMA, Oakland Museum of California, Long Beach Museum of Art, and LACMA ("24 Young Los Angeles Artists," 1971; "10 Years of Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions," 1973). After receiving a Young Talent Award from LACMA in 1970, he enrolled in the first class at the new California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik. While there, he experimented with performance, photography and video art and graduated with a BFA in the inaugural class of 1973. 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.
In his later career, Ray was included in the LACMA exhibition, "Made In California: Art, Image and Identity (1900–2000)," the assemblage-art survey "L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints" (2007, Tilton Gallery, New York; Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles), "The Artist's Museum" (MOCA LA, 2010), and Prospect.3 in New Orleans, among others. In 2017, a 50-year survey of his work, "Complexion Constellation," took place at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles.
