Mar 19, 2025 — May 25, 2025
Bob Ray (b. 1952) works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and even correspondence and performance. Born in Warrensburg, Missouri, just east of Kansas City, he now lives with his wife in the small town of Washington in eastern North Carolina.
Guest-curated by Mark Sloan, Bob Ray: Suit Yourself features a selection of the artist’s most recent paintings and drawings. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionist painters, Ray also draws from the Dada and Fluxus movements. Each of Ray’s artworks offers evidence of its own evolution. Erasures, false starts, notes, scribbles, overpainting, and tentative asides are visible on the layered surfaces. The artist incorporates household substances into his work, including housepaint, tar, masking tape, coffee, butter, tea, and collaged fragments of previous works.
Since 1990, he has actively participated in international correspondence art activities and projects. His contributions to correspondence art—or art sent through the postal service—have brought his work to Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Japan, the United States, Bolivia, Spain, Hungary, Switzerland, and Latvia. He has participated in extended exchanges with some of the most significant mail artists in the world, including Ray Johnson, Richard C., Giorgio Cavallini, and Torma Cauli. His mail art has been published and exhibited internationally.
Ray was the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in 2015, and he has had recent shows at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina; Lump Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina; and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
The GCMA has published an exhibition catalog of Ray’s works that includes a commissioned collaboration with California poet Allison Benis White, which will be available for purchase.