Joy Ray’s interdisciplinary practice explores textiles as instruments of divination, adopting techniques like quilting and weaving to conduct inquiries into the spectral, speculative, and unreliable. Central to Ray’s research into the unknowable are methods of abstraction, concealment, illumination, and reconstitution that extract visual language from source materials like archival texts and oral histories.
Joy Ray lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, CA), the Hawaiʻi Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, the Museum of Art and History (MOAH; Lancaster, CA), SAIC Galleries (Chicago), BravinLee (NYC), and Patricia Sweetow (LA). Ray’s work is held in the collection of MOAH and in private collections. Her practice and exhibitions have been featured in publications including the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Colossal, The Art Newspaper, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artillery, and whitehot. Joy Ray holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
“If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant.”
