MONTEREY IS NOT THE OBVIOUS PLACE TO MEET REX RAY FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Born Michael Patterson in Germany in 1956, the artist who became known as Rex Ray grew up in Colorado Springs and spent his most productive decades in San Francisco, cutting and layering paper into compositions that made him a fixture of that city’s art and design scene long before his death in 2015.
Yet it’s the Monterey Museum of Art, not a bigger San Francisco institution, presenting Rex Ray: We Are All Made of Light, the first retrospective ever assembled of his work. The reason the show landed in Monterey has everything to do with Cydney Payton, an independent curator who works often with MMA and who counted Ray among her close friends. Payton co-curated the retrospective with Griff Williams, who served as Ray’s art dealer for decades and, in her words, “knows where all the paintings are.” The pieces now on display at MMA come from private collections.
Their history goes back much further than this show: Payton mounted Ray’s first-ever museum exhibition while she was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. That exhibit in 2009 featured a single piece roughly 120 feet long that can still be found documented online. After Ray’s death in 2015, she helped place his archive with institutions that could keep it public: UC Berkeley, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Kirkland Museum, now part of the Denver Art Museum. “They’re different bodies of work, but I’m trying to ensure his legacy endures,” she says.
Bringing this show to Monterey instead of San Francisco was a deliberate choice. “I’m interested in showing the work in an environment where it hasn’t been seen before,” Payton explains. “In San Francisco he’s well known, and it would have had a tremendous reception.” But MMA offered something a hometown crowd couldn’t: an audience meeting Ray’s work for the first time.
REX RAY STARTED IN GRAPHIC DESIGN before enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980s, though Payton resists the idea that fine art came second. “He was a successful artist from the start, in the sense that he had his own ideas,” she says. “Making a living, which is what success implies, came through the graphic work first and then the artwork. But those two probably arrived at the same time in his career.”
In the main gallery, that vocabulary plays out at scale. Most of the work is quite large, at 5-by-6 feet. Ray’s work “Placidium,” capturing the essence of his own visual folklore, is a large 4.5-by-4.5-foot square. It shows the garden of his favorite forms, ethereal and plant-like that tend to bloom in their abstract vases, festive like peacock feathers. The same shapes recur across canvases, deployed differently each time, built from thousands of individually hand-printed, hand-painted or hand-manipulated pieces of paper glued together.
“He used scissors like making light,” Payton says. “He was always cutting things up and building a cache of shapes to work from.”
The compositions read as intuitive rather than planned – “you can judge which came first just by the layering,” Payton notes – and nearly all of them sit on a background rendered in a faux wood-panel texture, a detail Payton reads as both a joke and a clue. “A little kitschy, a little ’70s suburbia,” she calls it, tracing it to Ray’s childhood in a Colorado Springs subdivision, the kind of repetitive tract housing the photographer Robert Adams once made famous. She also wonders, without ever having asked Ray directly, whether the motif carries an echo of German marquetry, the wood-inlay tradition his birth country helped perfect. “Rex and I never talked about this, but there may be some influence in how marquetry assembles wood from different parts into a whole,” she notes.
Formally, Payton places the work in the territory of “post-abstraction” – organic rather than geometric, with a figural presence she believes was never fully intentional. “I don’t think he was trying to make direct figures, but those shapes were appealing to him,” she says. Some pieces resemble Rorschach tests, others read as mandalas, both looking inward; still others unfold like landscapes, looking outward, populated by recurring vases and floral motifs. “There’s a duality in the overall work,” Payton says.
Ray’s pieces “give you an immediate hit of something you’re drawn to,” Payton says, and a decade after he died, she reads that immediacy differently. “They offer something we’re missing: the vibrancy of art, its ability to transform us and take us to another place in our imaginations… If he had lived longer, I think they would have appreciated the way I see them now.”
THE VIEWING TOUR AT MMA STARTS BEFORE A SINGLE PAINTING COMES INTO VIEW. Much of the framing comes through photographs by Henrik Kam documenting Ray’s apartment and studio exactly as he left them. “You can see where he lived and where he worked,” Payton says. “From that, you can gather the details of his life.”
The images reveal a voracious reader – bookshelves crowd nearly every wall – and a collector with an eye trained on his peers: two Warhol cow prints, a Damien Hirst, a Paolo Soleri sculpture, among pieces representing mid-century modern design.
Ray’s materials were as layered as his biography – photography, handmade woodblock prints, newsprint, magazine cutouts – drawing on “modernism, Dada, decorative arts, Fluxus, pop art, and zines,” Payton says, without settling into any one of them. He was also an activist and designed graphics for organizations such as Act Up, an early AIDS awareness and advocacy group. Elsewhere the show gets into the physical labor behind the work: papers mid-development, brayers, paintbrushes, small studies and a piece pairing two images of David Bowie, with whom Ray collaborated for years.
The gallery’s largest work, a sprawling “Wall of Sound,” anchors dozens and dozens of his exercises or studies on paper, a documentation of his process. It arrived at the museum in a box from Williams’ archive, one of several such finds. The studies catch Ray mid-process: a balloon-like form full of air, and passages of black, exploding shapes Payton compares to speech bubbles. “I think they relate to the expression of language and words, with that same dynamism,” she says. It’s an observation that extends into the studies’ evident debt to music.
Ray was an avid listener, and the smaller cut-up studies recall the collage techniques Brian Eno and David Bowie used in their own recording process. “They’re cut-ups – many pieces of music and putting them together,” Payton says. “They connect back to music. They’re meant to resonate like sound.”
NOT EVERYTHING IN THE SHOW IS AT MONUMENTAL SCALE. A run of resin-surfaced panels, installed together as a single sculptural unit, could just as easily stand alone, Payton says: “I think Rex would have welcomed seeing them as one full unit, but they can also be seen as individual works.” Nearby sit the editions – prints released in runs of 25, flatter and more affordable than the layered originals, offering collectors of more modest means a way in. Ray’s originals moved through private collections and institutions alike (SFMOMA holds several), but Payton pushes back gently on any hierarchy that would dismiss the work, editions included, as merely decorative. “If you make work and it’s sold to people, it’s going to be decorative,” she says. “I don’t think that’s antithetical to a reading of his work, or of any artist’s work.”
That same instinct toward accessibility ran through Ray’s long career designing book jackets, developed with editor Amy Scholder, whom he met through San Francisco’s City Lights scene. The covers on view include work for the philosopher Georges Bataille or Valerie Solanas, infamous for shooting Andy Warhol, alongside a jacket for the New York poet John Giorno. “These were high-risk publications,” Payton says of the era’s small-press literary underground. The same sensitivity carried into concert posters on loan from a past show Payton organized with the LGBTQ+ Historical Society: five different Bowie concert bills, plus posters for Radiohead, Björk, and Cyndi Lauper, among many others. “What I find beautiful about them is Rex’s sensitivity to the artist in the typography and the choices he made,” Payton says, adding that Ray was also among the first designers to work digitally.
Ray designed album covers today seen as iconic (notably Reality by David Bowie), as well as highly customized tour posters for performers such as Radiohead or Paul McCartney, and worked with labels such as Sony Music and Warner Brothers.
The exhibition’s title, We Are All Made of Light, comes from one of Ray’s own holiday cards, a phrase he sent to friends for years. It’s a fitting frame for an artist whose working life resists easy separation from his personal one – a point underscored by 2009 footage shot by Colorado public broadcaster PBS12, not aired until 2018, in which Ray describes his process against the two places that shaped him: the Colorado Springs suburbs of his childhood and the San Francisco he moved to in the early 1980s to attend art school, and never really left.
“He was very Warholian in that he wanted everybody to have his work, so he was very generous, and there’s a lot of his work out there,” Payton says.
In the museum shop, that dual identity is for sale in miniature: a T-shirt reading “We Are All Made of Light,” a reprint of the exhibition’s catalogue of the same name, greeting cards that have already sold out, books and puzzles. The museum has even built a Spotify playlist of the musicians whose album art and posters Ray designed.