Joe Ray (artist)

[9][10][11] 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.

[2][21] 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.

[27][5] Critic Shana Nys Dambrot has written that the apparent eclecticism of Ray's practice "nevertheless posits a thread of conceptual and aesthetic gestalt that links all his works on a continuum of light, color, optical/ambiguous phenomena, and the sociopolitical context for perception, portraiture, performance, and abstraction.

[2][7][5] These sculptors, including Ray, embraced both scientific, technical aspects of the material and its more esoteric, perception-altering properties, such as the ability to take on solid form and be animated by transient light and movement in its surroundings.

[30][20] Curator Ed Schad wrote, the sculpture "draws a humanistic line from the infinitesimal world of the atomic nucleus through the structure of the human heart to the patterns of stars and solar systems," with its seven pairings linking to that number's "mystical and numerological meanings, adding a cryptic edge.

[6][2] In 1971, Ray, Terry O’Shea and Doug Edge were featured in the inaugural exhibition of the Market Street Program (1971–3), an early, artist- and socially driven project supported by Walter Hopps and Robert Irwin.

"[8][32][33] 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.

[8][33][3][1] 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.

"[18][4] 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.