[4][5] Born in Detroit, Michigan, on October 16, 1927,[1][4] Ray Johnson grew up in a working-class neighborhood and attended Cass Technical High School where he was enrolled in the advertising art program.

Josef Albers, before and after his notable sabbatical in Mexico, was in residence at Black Mountain College for six of the ten semesters that Johnson studied there.

Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Robert Motherwell, Ossip Zadkine, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Ilya Bolotowski, Jacob Lawrence, Beaumont Newhall, M. C. Richards, and Jean Varda also taught at BMC during Johnson's time there.

Johnson decided on Albers' advice to stay at BMC for a final term in summer 1948, when the visiting faculty included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold.

[7] In the documentary How to Draw a Bunny, Richard Lippold delicately but candidly confesses to carrying on a love affair with Johnson for many years which began at Black Mountain College.

[8]Johnson moved with Richard Lippold to New York City by early 1949,[1] rejoining Cage and Cunningham and befriending, within the next couple of years, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Ad Reinhardt, Stan Vanderbeek, Norman Solomon, Lucy Lippard, Sonia Sekula, Carolyn Brown and Earle Brown, Judith Malina, Diane di Prima, Julian Beck, Remy Charlip, James Waring, and innumerable others.

[1] But by 1953 he turned to collage and left the American Abstract Artists, rejecting his early paintings, which it is rumored that he later burned in Cy Twombly's fireplace.

Johnson began to create small, irregularly shaped works incorporating fragments from popular culture, most notably the Lucky Strikes logo and images from fan magazines of such movie stars as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple.

[1][4] He carried boxes of moticos around New York, showing them on sidewalks, at cafes, in Grand Central Station and other public places; he asked passersby what they thought of them, and recorded some of their responses.

"[11] Johnson's friend Lucy Lippard would later write that "The Elvis ... and Marilyn Monroe [collages], heralded Warholian Pop.

A note about the cover image in January 1958's Art News pointed out that "[Jasper] Johns' first one-man show ... places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson".

Most of them looked quite dismayed that nothing was going on ... Well, finally Ray arrived ... and he brought with him a large corrugated cardboard box of wooden spools.

It was part of a variety show that was organized by Nicholas Cernovich and Alan Marlow of New York Poet's Theatre, had lighting design by Billy Name (aka Billy Linich), and featured artists such as Fred Herko, George Brecht, Simone Morris, La Monte Young, Stan Vanderbeek, and others.

Consisting of cryptic texts and drawings (mostly) by Johnson, they were mailed a few at a time, randomly, and offered for sale via a classified ad in The Village Voice.,[18] thus very few people ever received all the pages.

[20] On June 3, 1968 – the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas with a gun she'd stored under May Wilson's bed – Johnson was mugged at knifepoint.

Severely shaken, Johnson moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, and the next year bought a house in nearby Locust Valley, where Richard Lippold and his family resided.

Around that time, Johnson began his silhouette project, creating approximately 200 profiles of personal friends, artists, and celebrities which became the basis for many of his later collages.

His subjects included Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Edward Albee, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Lynda Benglis, Nam Jume Paik, David Hockney, David Bowie, Christo, Peter Hujar, Roy Lichtenstein, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, among others – a who's who of the New York arts and letters scene.

During the 1980s Johnson purposefully receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider, maintaining personal connections via mail art and telephone largely in place of physical interaction.

Johnson feverishly continued to work on richer and more complex collages, such as Untitled (Seven Black Feet with Eyelashes), in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Following his suicide, filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter (in conjunction with Frances Beatty of Richard L. Feigen & Co.) spent six years probing the mysteries of Johnson's life and art.

The film includes interviews with artists Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Billy Name, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Judith Malina, and many others.

[30][31] Canadian art rock band Women's 2010 album Public Strain includes two songs that directly reference Ray Johnson.

Their 2008 album Women also featured a song called Sag Harbor Bridge, referencing the place of Johnson's death.