Wrapping Up Ray

_Backstage at Ray Johnson/ABAD Exhibition with Seeking Kali_

1000 pieces of mail art and an extravagant evening of lecture, readings and performance! Curators Joan L. Harrison, LuAnn Palazzo and Constance Sloggatt Wolf added a wonderful chapter to the continuing global explosion of A Book About Death exhibits. Long Island University's SAL Gallery at the CW Post campus hosted an opening reception Nov. 3rd that featured all of the above.

The Seeking Kali group of projects that I helped launch with my fellow collaborators Ria Vanden Eynde of Belgium and Canadian Susan Shulman was well represented at Ray Johnson/A Book About Death.  Artists currently in our on-going artist call were represented via a video presentation of their work as well as a loop on a monitor that played throughout the evenings opening activities.  Many of these artists found their way to Seeking Kali as a result of their past association with ABAD exhibits.
One of my highlights was presenting the Shadow Theater that I developed around the subject of Kali.

I've put together a video that compresses some of these highlights into a six minute tour of the opening.  This is just a bit of the festival atmosphere that the evening presented.


Ray Johnson/A Book About Death Opening from William Evertson on Vimeo.

There are more exhibition highlights as well as a complete archive of the work submitted on the Ray Johnson/ABAD blog.

There is more information about past and future A Book About Death opportunities on the the ABAD archive site. 

Matthew Rose, creator of the A Book About Death that premiered at Emily Harvey Gallery in NYC mentioned "Several new shows are being planned; for Italy, London, Paris, Germany, Arizona and China (a real possibility) and I hope a major museum in Tokyo."

The Italy exhibit is being planned by Virginia Milici, a long time follower of this blog.