Christopher Ray
When Christopher Ray, just short of 87, died on December 5, 2021 it was, as a dear friend put it, “like a great tree in the forest has fallen, or a column in the Parthenon.“
Tucked away for 49 years in an old house near Crum Creek Woods, he and his wife raised three daughters in their tree-filled oasis, where pets roamed free amidst his ever-growing sculpture garden. Meanwhile, within the walls of his vast studio, with pulleys overhead and tools and heavy machinery at the ready, he fashioned exhibitions on prehistoric life, aerospace technology, economics, physics, electricity, ethnology, Egyptian and Chinese culture, and more, while the strains of classical music blared.
It all began in Westport, Connecticut, where, as the son of noted artists and landscape architects, Jo and Eloise Ray, Chris had what he called a Huck Finn childhood—sailing with his father, collecting Hermit Crabs, and getting up to all kinds of mischief with his friends. His first job after graduating from Reed College was as curator of natural science at a small museum in Scranton, where just for fun he founded a rocket society that still exists today. Next, he fulfilled a childhood dream by working as a preparator at the famed Museum of Natural History in New York. Learning from the great muralists and diorama-makers of the time, he created exhibitions that are still on display, while also grinding lenses for the Hayden Planetarium (making the front page of the New York Times when he set up a telescope in front of the Museum to view an eclipse), and working with crabs in his own biology lab. In his free time he walked across Central Park to take sculpture classes at the Art Students League. But his New York days were over when he accepted museum jobs in San Antonio, Texas, then in Vancouver, Canada, and then in St. Paul, Minnesota, before returning east as Director of Exhibits at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
Finally forming his own firm, Ray Museum Studios, he researched, designed and built scholarly models for the Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, including: the Mayan City of Tikal in Guatemala; the Temple of the Sun in Pachacamac, Peru; an interpretive model of a Pompeiian House; and the Gordian citadel of ancient Turkey. (Find articles and photographs online at Penn’s Expedition magazine.) As a freelancer he had a wide variety of clients, including the Newlin Mill in Concord Township; The Mill Project of the Delaware Valley; Camden Aquarium; Delaware Museum of Natural History; Winterthur Museum; and the United Nations Building in New York. One year he created an exhibition of live bees in a hive for the Philadelphia Flower Show.
Through it all, he never stopped sculpting. His work was shown at Grounds for Sculpture, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Wilmington Fringe Festival, and the Community Art Center in Wallingford, and he got juried into major shows across the country. Among his dozens of indoor sculptures, many of them abstract, is a remarkably realistic horse head commissioned by the Assateague National Refuge visitor center; it was, he claimed, always looking at him. (To see some of Chris’s sculptures go to http://cray-sculpture.blogspot.com.)
His boyhood fascination with astronomy never left him. After joining the Antique Telescope Society, he developed a sideline of restoring large telescopes in various observatories around the country. Working with the late Wulff-Dieter Heintz, professor of astronomy at Swarthmore College, he maintained the College’s 24” telescope throughout the years.
Other projects for the College included restoration of the Calder Mobile, after coordinating with the Calder Foundation to find the right red. On windy days he could be seen ascending the grassy mound on which the mobile stands to free its tangled parts.
As a contribution to the town of Swarthmore, he fashioned a quaint kiosk for the posting of announcements. Bob Small, founder of the Mad Poets Society of which Chris was a member, wrote a tribute poem to commemorate the kiosk’s unveiling. The poem is called “The Wizard of Swarthmore.” Chris’s own poems are magical, resplendent with cosmological images and witty concepts; his one short story is a fantasy about a sailboat. Known to friends and family as an incorrigible punster, he loved solving puzzles and reading novels from the Golden Age of Mystery writers. As a real-life adventurer, he told compelling stories of his escapades, like getting robbed by bandits on the coastal desert of Peru, climbing Mount Hood, and sleeping in a tent in Kenya as elephants tramped by and later leaping into his car to escape a charging rhino. But not before he took its picture. Locally, his cat Pumpkin regularly escorted him up Elm Avenue, and neighborhood dogs knew he was never without a pocket full of doggy bones.
Thinking of Chris in the past tense is heart-breaking for his wife Brit, and their daughters Waverley, Wendelin, and Vanessa. We loved him and will never see his like again. He was predeceased by his brother, Johnny, and sister, Pat.
SAND
I am but a grain of sand
Shifting with the sea
To lend my ears to lobster calls
At the roots of the wave-white tree
I’m companion to the bubbles
And Patron of the surf
I feast on the sun’s bright sparkle
And eat at the crumbling turf
I do not question of my gods
But follow with the tide
I am but a grain of sand
And the waters are my guide.
—Christopher Ray, 1957
