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Collection of Ray Johnson-associated mail art demonstrating the seeding of the New York Correspondence School through its original secretary, Marie Tavroges Stilkind [b. 1930]. Born in the United Kingdom before emigrating with her family to Canada after WWII, Stilkind went on to attend Black Mountain College (1951-1954), studying poetry and photography in the wake of Ray Johnson (grad. 1948). Upon finally crossing paths in 1961, and bonding over their asynchronous times at the experimental school, Johnson inducted Stilkind into his New York Correspondence School. In a June 1997 interview with Ruud Janssen, founder of the International Union of Mail Artists, Marie relayed her origin story within the mail-art network: I met him [Johnson] when Albert M. Fine, a musician and student at Juilliard School of Music, brought him to my office in the Fishbowl, where I worked as an editorial assistant for the Juilliard Review. Ray and I became instant friends […] Ray was never effusive so it took longer to get to know him and his mysterious mailings. The mailings, I was given to understand, were very important and it was an honored responsibility to see that the envelopes got stamped and mailed to their recipients. The mailings would contain clippings from newspapers, magazines, a dictionary. Each mailing would contain items that were personally relevant to the recipient; everything was original. Stilkind s carte blanche in the mail room at Juilliard garnered her the position of the first "secretary" of the New York Correspondence School, as the prestigious music school became a place through which many of the correspondences were dispatched. Her utilization of Juilliard s capabilities as a switchboard chronologically aligns with Bill Wilson s account of Ray Johnson s early "please send to(s)" in Lightworks : The Ray Johnson Issue: The difference between Ray s work and any earlier mailart occurred when he wrote on a piece of paper "please send to." The first "please send to" which I am aware of was his response to the birth, on June 6, 1962, of identical twins, Katherine Covey Wilson and Ara Ann Wilson. For Ray, the birth of two babies[…] with almost indiscernible differences was an epiphany…Ray had been in correspondence with the grandmother of the twins, May Wilson, since 1956…so he must have felt free, in July 1962, to mail to her a clipping on which he typed, in red, "Please send to: Kate & Ara Wilson, Dance Mill Road, Phoenix, Maryland".And thus the first "please send to" in my family elaborated upon a system which was in place… This method of directing letters, messages, collages, and assemblage materials further enhanced the existent nodal platform of mail art that Ray Johnson had been carefully constructing for nearly a decade a form which he had been practicing since his earliest letters to fellow Cass Tech student, Arthur Secunda. This new practice strengthened the connective tissue that linked the multitude of enlisted correspondents, becoming a procession that provoked Marie into referring to mail art as to "correspon-dancing," as a way of describing the nature of the exchange as an infinite dance. As she relayed it to Ruud Jansen: "Ray sent an envelope (one foot forward), the recipient sent an envelope back (another foot forward).The dance never ended as you continued to send your cuttings to one another." This dance would continue three months after Johnson s death in 1995 at the Black Mountain College reunion, where Marie delivered a postcard to Jonathan Williams that Johnson had addressed to him 30 years previously. Though this collection is only a partial constellation of the network formed through the NYCS, it illustrates the characteristic longevity of its relationships and the careening playfulness Johnson impressed when intertwining them with something so simple yet uncharted as the conduits of the postal system. These paper trails would last a lifetime it was Marie who took the photo of Ray Johnson, in leather mo.
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