[Co-sponsored with RAVE] Jenny Harris, “Ray Johnson, Sybil Shearer, and the Taoist Collages”

Please join us on Wednesday, April 24, at *5:30-7:30pm CT*, at CWAC 152 for a workshop co-sponsored by VMPEA and RAVE (Research in Art and Visual Evidence). This workshop features:

Jenny Harris

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Ray Johnson, Sybil Shearer, and the Taoist Collages” 

Discussant: Lucien Sun

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

~Reception to follow in the CWAC Lounge~

*Please note the special time of this event.* This workshop will take place in-person. The abstract and bios for this workshop can be found below.

We hope to see many of you in CWAC 152!

Abstract: 

In 1955, Ray Johnson, an artist based in New York who would go on to become a pioneer of mail art, sent a group of 30 “Taoist Collages” to choreographer Sybil Shearer, then living in Northbrook, Illinois. Previously unknown to scholars of Johnson’s work, the collages were discovered in Shearer’s attic and subsequently purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. In this talk, I’ll discuss the various ways the Taoist collages tell a new story about Johnson’s ties to the world of dance. By presenting this work jointly at the RAVE and VMPEA workshops, I hope to solicit feedback and suggestions about how I might develop a more thorough account of Johnson’s engagement with East Asian culture and ideas.

Bios:

Jenny Harris is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in twentieth-century art at the University of Chicago. Her research explores global modernism with interests in the relationships between abstraction and ornament, dance and visual art, and craft and design. Her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues, Artforum, the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, and the New York Times. Between 2013 and 2019, she worked in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture where she assisted with the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective and the reinstallation of the collection. She also co-organized the 2019 Exhibition Artist’s Choice: The Shape of Shape with Amy Sillman and Michelle Kuo. In 2022-3, she worked as a Chicago Objects Study Initiative Fellow in Modern and Contemporary at the Art Institute of Chicago. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Art History in 2012.

Lucien Sun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. In 2017–18, he was a Sumitomo Corporation visiting student at the University of Tokyo studying Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. His dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between regional space and the visual culture of southern Shanxi in north China between the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. He is also interested in the art of book and how picture in its broad sense moved across space, borders, and visual media in medieval Eurasia.