"In this brilliant and revelatory book, Miriam Kienle provides a sophisticated reevaluation of one of the twentieth centurys most prescient artists, Ray Johnson. She conclusively demonstrates that Johnsons work existed in, and interacted with, an intricate web of theoretical, sexual, political, and aesthetic concerns, most of which have never been broached in previous work on the artist. The result is a crucial contribution to thinking about Johnson, postwar culture, and queer politics and aesthetics."-Anthony Grudin, author of Warhol's Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism and Like a Little Dog: Andy Warhol's Queer Ecologies
"Miriam Kienles detailed study of Ray Johnsons correspondence art is intimate and focused yet expansive-much like Johnsons work itself. Finally, we have a book-length, deeply researched account of Johnsons queer ways of making and communicating. Queer Networks establishes Johnson as an inescapably centrifugal figure for the history of queer art in the 1960s and 1970s, and it argues for the wider potential of Johnsons practice of rampant recontextualization as a cipher for the social and information networks at play in postwar American culture."-David J. Getsy, author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art
"Kienle analyzes in diligent detail the intriguing and sometimes bizarre ways in which Johnson used his marginal status to prank the art world from its periphery. This opens a revealing new lens on an enigmatic art world figure."-Publishers Weekly
"Kienles perceptive centering of queerness in Johnsons artmaking would illuminate all this work as well.
"-Gay & Lesbian Review
"Kienle examines the subversive subtext of Johnsons methods as he forged connections and worked against the classification systems that dominate the art world. Ultimately, Johnsons art proposes an alternative mode of making and being."-Hyperallergic
"Queer Networks makes clear that developments in queer theory and queer art history specifically in the past two decades mean the complexity of Johnsons ephemeral correspondence practice can be understood more fully."-CAA Reviews
