Tribecan and forever New Yorker Ellen Levy’s most recent book, “A Book About Ray,” has made it onto the Times’ list of the 10 best art books of 2024, and there’s a good reason: it’s based on original research that no one had ever taken on, despite the accomplishments — or maybe because of — its subject: New Yorker Ray Johnson, a collage and correspondence artist known as the city’s most famous unknown artist. And there’s a neighborhood connection: longtime Tribecan John Willenbecher was Levy’s first stop in what would become a nine-year process — of all her sources, John was perhaps the one who knew Johnson, who was nearly impossible to know, best.

“Levy’s biography respects the mystery without fastening on it,” Holland Cotter wrote in The Times. “Instead, she works on evoking the performative character of Johnson’s life in a biography that has a dancerly rhythm of feints and darts, goes off on tangents and doubles back, keeping her prose, like her subject, moving, changing. Like the life it records, the book is a brilliant turn in — highest compliment — a very Ray way.”

So from the beginning: Levy is an English professor by degree, and has taught at Pratt, the School of Visual Arts and Vanderbilt University. But her specialty has always been the crossover between literature and the other arts, especially the visual arts. And within that category, an even finer specialty is the New York School of Poets — Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, for example — many of whom were deep in the art world.

“There are all these stories of poets who connect in the art world and it then influences their work as poets — those are my stories,” Levy said.

She was finishing a book on Asbery, Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell — Moore and Cornell were friends and Ashbury worshipped Cornell — when she came across the collages of Ray Johnson. She went to see a show at Richard Feigen’s gallery, and said she had never seen anything like them.

“I wanted to make him the last chapter of the book but there was too much there,” she said. “He did collages, he was a performance artist before there was performance art, and he did this thing called correspondence art — and it became a thing. Ray Johnson is point zero.

“He started sending things that said ‘please send to…’ with a list. It went to hundreds and then thousands of people. But it was very much like the internet — and people think of him as the prophet of social media. You would make more ‘friends’ the longer you were in the network.”

But despite the early sharing tendencies, Johnson played hard-to-get with the commercial side of the art world, refusing to sell his own work and being notoriously difficult with dealers. That gave him an erratic reputation in the art world, even though he knew everyone (Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns) and everyone knew him.

“He was New York’s most famous unknown artist — no one quite knew what he did, because he stayed away from galleries. People knew him as a character, but they didn’t know the full range of his work.”

The book took nine years for Levy to complete, and she grew to love the guy. She had to look at a lot of art and a lot of mail and assemble the story together — collage it together, I would say. “When you are the first one to tell the story, the story is not yet there.”

Levy’s taking a break for a bit now — or at least she’s not ready to commit or say what’s next. She’s got one artist in mind and a personal project that she’s mulling over. But it sounds like the next dive will be something, I’d guess, equally challenging.

“This was really hard to finish,” she said. “But working in this new risky style made me want to do something creative and push myself in terms of form.”

To follow, an excerpt.

Ray Johnson, like Emily Dickinson, dreamed of an unworldly — a virtually world-less — art: the sheen without the moon. And like her, Johnson dreamed of an audience that might grant him the recognition he craved — that we all crave. It was an audience that, for him as for her, took the form of a particular receiver, separated from the sender in space and time. The sender’s and receiver’s positions are reversible, they are equals, but the distance between them preserves their particularity. A perfect democracy, held in delicate, precarious balance. Unlike the other dream, not impossible on earth, for a moment, at least.