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Galleries: Ray Johnson's boxes, and sublime collage portraits

Of the various curious things the enigmatic collagist and correspondence artist Ray Johnson did over the course of his career - and much of what he did was pointedly inexplicable - one was to suddenly transfer ownership of 13 cardboard boxes tied with twi

Of the various curious things the enigmatic collagist and correspondence artist Ray Johnson did over the course of his career - and much of what he did was pointedly inexplicable - one was to suddenly transfer ownership of 13 cardboard boxes tied with twine to his friend Robert Warner, a New York optician, in 1990. Warner looked over their contents - found objects and hundreds of envelopes (addressed by Johnson but never mailed) - but did not begin to archive them until after Johnson's suicide in 1995, at age 67.

In June, at the invitation of Esopus Space in New York, Warner opened each of the boxes in public, discussed their contents, and chose certain objects of Johnson's for display there. Now, Arcadia University Art Gallery has enlarged on that initial presentation with "Tables of Contents: Ray Johnson Bob Box Archive," an exhibition of all 13 boxes and their contents or lack thereof (Box 7 was empty).

The show's installation suits its subject matter. An assortment of tables found on campus have been pushed together in the center of the gallery like a flea market in the round, the surface of each arranged with the artifacts of a single box. The addressed envelopes of Box 11 occupy a table next to Box 5's collections of dolls' legs and a rubber egg and Box 9's two blue octopi and fake teeth. Box 1's arrangements of beach glass, book spines, and blue sunglasses cozy up to Box 2's ice scraper, shot glass, and jigsaw puzzle piece, and so on. Seeing the obsessive, wide-ranging nature of Johnson's collection laid out in this almost-overlapping fashion, you're given an insight into all the variables that coalesced in his artistic practice, and the fluidity of his punning in words and images.

The exhibition also features the boxes themselves; objects, drawings, and posters on the walls, and the 2002 documentary film about Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, in which James Rosenquist, Jeanne-Claude and Christo, Chuck Close, Billy Name, and others who spent time with him expound on the mystery that was Johnson.

The only quiet in this show emanates from Johnson's "serious" art, which was a separate activity from his mail art. A group of five sublime, dark collage portraits, silhouettes composed of collage fragments that he made between 1972 and 1981, radiate an otherworldly calm. Jasper Johns and Joseph Cornell come to mind.

Seeing these, and the intense focus they would seem to have required, it occurred to me that perhaps Johnson had always concealed his possessions in boxes.

Robert Warner will lead an informal tour of the show on Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m., during which he'll explore an archive of carbon paper that Johnson used to copy typed letters and drawings. The afternoon will also include a conversation with artist Howard Hussey, who was Joseph Cornell's studio assistant from 1966 to 1972, and who will discuss that artist's influence on Johnson.

Word works

Ray Johnson's influence on Rob Wynne, who was the recipient of correspondences from the older artist in the early 1970s, lives on in the elegiac poured and mirrored glass words and phrases he is showing at Locks Gallery. Looking at and reading Wynne's work - his art asks viewers to do both, as Johnson's often did - his wispy, fleeting snippets writ large become more than the sum of their parts.

Sometimes Wynne's wordplays use only one word, as in his piece Intuition (2011), a vertical arrangement, with "IN" on top, "TU" in the middle, and "iTiOn" on the bottom. Or they might be one word rethought as two, as in Be Come (2009), presented with "BE" above "COME!" Other times they're composed of several words arranged top to bottom, such as Rue de Fleurus, Visible Silence, or Be Fore Long. Memory and a sense of loss emanate from all these works.

Neysa Grassi's 10-year survey of her paintings and prints on Locks' second floor shows the artist moving from her signature veiled forms reminiscent of the human body to include shapes and contours more suggestive of landscapes.

That new direction is most obvious in Poet's Garden (2011), in which a strong dark line appears to outline a misty grotto, but it can also be detected in What the Clouds Say (2011), a vision of white, cloudlike forms with an eye in its midst, and Willow (2011), in which the rib-cage form common to Grassi's paintings has morphed into a dense thicket or twisted basket shape.

Grassi's jewel-like abstractions should have more empty space around them than this installation allowed. The display of her monoprints, hung in the smaller back "viewing room," strikes just the right balance.