Joe Ray is an American artist based in Los Angeles.Born in Louisiana in 1944, Joe Ray grew up in Alexandria, and studied fine art at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1962, where he was one of few black students in a previously segregated college. Ray arrived in Los Angeles, in 1963, at the age of 20; in 1965 he was inducted into the US Army and sent to Viet Nam, two weeks after the Watts Riots. Upon his return, Ray moved to Leimert Park, and committed himself to his art making. He first showed his artwork in the 1969 4th Annual Watts Summer Festival Art Exhibition.
His work has moved between abstraction and representation and mediums that include painting, sculpture, performance art and photography. Ray began his career as a painter in Alexandria, Louisiana and arrived in Los Angeles in 1963. He showed early work in the 1969 4th Annual Watts Summer Festival Art Exhibition. Ray quickly received recognition through group exhibitions at SFMOMA, Oakland Museum of California, Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (in 24 Young Los Angeles Artists,1971; and 10 Years of Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions,1973). After receiving a Young Talent Award from LACMA in 1970, he enrolled in the first class at the new California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik. At CalArts, he experimented with performance, photography and video art and graduated with a BFA in their inaugural class of 1973.
Joe Ray has belonged to several notable art communities in L.A., including the Light and Space movement (he also assisted artist Larry Bell in Venice). He was then a founding member of the influential 1970s African American collective, Studio Z, with artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassenger, and Houston Conwill. Between 1978 and 1980, he was one of fifteen original members of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles Artists Advisory Council, alongside Vija Celmins and Robert Irwin.
Ray has exhibited at the MOCA, LACMA, SFMOMA, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, (CAMH), the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans (CACNO), and the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, among others. His artwork is in the permanent collections of LACMA, The Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation, The AÏSHTI Foundation, and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art. He lives and works in Los Angeles. His assemblage-painting, "US," 1993, is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it is installed as part of the Modern Art permanent collection. His work was included in Made In California: Art, Image and Identity (1900 - 2000), LACMA; and was notably included in L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints (2007) at Tilton Gallery (NY) and Roberts & Tilton (LA). Joe Ray received a 50-year survey, Complexion Constellation, at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in 2017.