18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 15-21, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com Rex Ray’s retrospective is a don’t-miss exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art. By Agata Popęda Color Theory Monterey is not the obvious place to meet Rex Ray for the first time. Born Michael Patterson in Germany in 1956, the artist who became known as Rex Ray grew up in Colorado Springs and spent his most productive decades in San Francisco, cutting and layering paper into compositions that made him a fixture of that city’s art and design scene long before his death in 2015. Yet it’s the Monterey Museum of Art, not a bigger San Francisco institution, presenting Rex Ray: We Are All Made of Light, the first retrospective ever assembled of his work. The reason the show landed in Monterey has everything to do with Cydney Payton, an independent curator who works often with MMA and who counted Ray among her close friends. Payton co-curated the retrospective with Griff Williams, who served as Ray’s art dealer for decades and, in her words, “knows where all the paintings are.” The pieces now on display at MMA COURTESY OF GALLERY 16 DANIEL DREIFUSS Rex Ray put together the Wall of Sound between 1995 and 2004. The composition comprises over 500 cut paper collages or studies that capture some of his most recognizable shapes and patterns. It is now on display in the Monterey Museum of Art. Ray’s “Centraria,” created circa 2010, is a mixed-media collage over canvas.
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