Charles Ray

Charles Ray (born 1953) is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years." Early life and education Ray was born in Chicago as the son of Helen and Wade Ray. His parents owned and ran a commercial art school which his grandmother had founded in 1916. He was the second oldest in his family and has four brothers and a sister. The family moved to Winnetka, Illinois, in 1960. Charles and his older brother, Peter, attended high school at the Catholic Marmion Military Academy in Aurora, Illinois, where their father had gone. On Saturdays he went to the Art Institute's studio program for high-school students. He earned his BFA at the University of Iowa and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History with Roland Brener, who exposed Ray to many of developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Anthony Caro and David Smith. He later studied with Stephen Zaima, where Ray executed many of his performance pieces in the undergraduate studio, like Plank Piece I–II.