''How to Draw a Bunny: A Ray Johnson Portrait'', is a 2002 American documentary film about the Detroit-born

pop Pop or POP may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Pop music, a musical genre Artists * POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade * Pop! (British group), a UK pop group * Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band Album ...

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

and

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

ist

Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...

Summary

Filmmakers John Walter and Andrew L. Moore delve into the mysterious life and death of Johnson, an artist whose “world was made up of amazing coincidences, serendipities and karmic gags,” according to Michael Kimmelman of ''The New York Times''. After Johnson's suicide, Moore and Walter conducted interviews with artists including

Christo Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009), known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, often large landmarks a ...

Chuck Close Charles Thomas Close (July 5, 1940 – August 19, 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealism, photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits ...

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Fox Lichtenstein ( ; October27, 1923September29, 1997) was an American pop artist. He rose to prominence in the 1960s through pieces which were inspired by popular advertising and the comic book style. Much of his work explores the relations ...

Judith Malina Judith Malina (June 4, 1926 – April 10, 2015) was a German-born American actress, director and writer. With her husband Julian Beck, Malina co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York C ...

, and

James Rosenquist James Albert Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 – March 31, 2017) was an American artist and one of the proponents of the pop art movement. Drawing from his background working in sign painting, Rosenquist's pieces often explored the role of advert ...

. In addition, they gathered photographs, works of art, and home movies, which were edited into a fast-paced narrative exploring the artist's life.

Reception

The filmmakers “couldn’t have chosen a more elusive subject for a movie; their success in evoking Johnson, and in documenting his world, is a triumph of sympathy over psychology, memory over historicism,” wrote Stuart Klawans for ''The Nation''. The film has a score of 78 on

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

Accolades

The film premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize. The film also won the Grand Prix du Public 2002 at the Rencontres Internationales de Cinema in Paris and was nominated for a 2003

Independent Spirit Award The Independent Spirit Awards, originally known as the FINDIE or Friends of Independents Awards, and later as the Film Independent Spirit Awards, are awards presented annually in Santa Monica, California, to independent filmmakers. Founded in ...

and listed in ''

New York Magazine ''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Clay Felker and Milton Glaser in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker'' a ...

''’s “Top Ten of 2004.”

References

External links

* *{{rotten-tomatoes, id=how_to_draw_a_bunny, title=How to Draw a Bunny
''New York Times'' film reviewThe entire film officially posted by BASEBALZAC on Vimeo
2002 films Documentary films about visual artists 2002 documentary films Mr. Mudd films American collage films American documentary films Pop art 2000s English-language films 2000s American films Sundance Film Festival award–winning films English-language documentary films