Event

How to Draw a Bunny

Guest Speaker: Dr. Kenneth Wayne, Chief Curator of the Heckscher Museum of Art

How to Draw a Bunny explores the fascinating, often hilarious, and always enigmatic world of artist and underground icon Ray Johnson. A "Pop Art mystery movie", the film is framed by Johnson's mysterious suicide in 1995 under puzzling circumstances that left friends and the public wondering if this was a final "performance." Little has been written about him, yet the man who many dubbed "the most famous unknown artist" was considered a genius whose career spanned nearly fifty years and whose collages have been exhibited in major museums. The film is itself a collage of photographs, art works, interviews, letters, home movies and video, that flow at the viewer like a jazz ensemble. The filmmakers penetrate into a "rabbit hole of an art world wonderland" and reveal not only an artist's fragmented life, but also the universe of his peers, friends, and critics. With interviews from Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Chuck Close, and James Rosenquist, and the artist himself, the film offers an understanding of the origins of present-day art, as well as the experience of an artist who wore many different faces and treated the art scene as a game without a prize.

USA, 2002, 90 min.