Ellen Levy
Author of
A Book About Ray (MIT Press, 2024)
Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford Univ Press, 2011)
Ellen Levy is the author of Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford UP) and essays and reviews on poetry, the visual arts, theater, and film for journals and magazines like Dissent, Genre,Modernism/Modernity, The Nation, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has taught at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt University.
Books BY ELLEN LEVY
A Book About Ray (MIT Press, 2024)
The first full-career survey of the idiosyncratic life and work of Ray Johnson, a collagist, performance artist, and pioneer of mail art.
PRAISE:
“To survey the densely entangled life and work of Ray Johnson, one needs an agile and surefooted guide like Ellen Levy. Building in new directions on the unfinished work of scholar and archivist Bill Wilson, Levy has coaxed out of letters, mailers, and collages a cohesive Ray—an artist as profound, prolific, and slippery as they come. Her book is an achievement of the first order and a fabulous read.” — Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Director of Ray Johnson Collection and Research, The Art Institute of Chicago
“I was a bit player in Ray Johnson’s world of enigma and constant surprises for three decades but only now, reading Ellen Levy’s masterful exegesis of both his public and private life do I feel I know him. She seamlessly connects his life performance to the web of allusions in his work and reveals the full scope of his germinating influence on pop art as well as being the genius who turned the US Postal Service into an art medium. Though he was famously unknown in his lifetime because he defied the art “market,” Levy’s A Book about Ray ensures he is now both famous and fully known. Brava!” — Michael Findlay, Director of Acquavella Galleries
Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford Univ Press, 2011)
PRAISE:
From Prudence Peiffer, “Ellen Levy’s Criminal Ingenuity,” Artform 51.3 (November 2012): “Enter Ellen Levy, whose dense but rewarding book is something like the bag of chips at the intellectual cocktail party: It avoids glamour for crisp pithiness and it fuels the gathering of luminaries it serves, even as it leaves one hungry for more.
Levy focuses on the relative wallflowers at the American modernist party, via the poets Marianne Moore and Ashbery and the artist Joseph Cornell. (True to form, O’Hara is a blurred figure passing across the lens of many discussions.) All three, Levy argues, share a special status as insider/outsider with respect to the establishment. They were unaligned powers, owing fealty neither to literature nor visual art, and their work hovers on the threshold between word and image, sampling from both when neither had clinched hierarchal dominance. In standing outside the historical struggle between the arts, these figures still managed to define, or offer a counterdefinition of, their historical moment. Levy stakes her claims against the foil of the “institution,” a term that for her in fact connotes an amalgam of institutions—the people and vested parties in both disciplines that, at the time, were bent upon autonomy—while suspending her own argument in the hybrid space between the arts. She reads art’s broader institutions as if they were individual works of art, split between two myths of autonomy: poetry’s distance from commodity, an ostensible result of its academic disinterestedness, and visual art’s direct accessibility to experience.”