Arts and Letters

I have invited the artists Christopher Williams, Monika Baer, Aria Dean, and Abraham Cruzvillegas to play a made-up game with a simple set of rules that will unfold over the next year. Each artist must create a show with at least four objects, and what they place in the gallery is entirely up to them. Christopher Williams makes the opening move. When his show closes, the next player, Monika Baer, has to follow an additional rule: to leave in place at least two objects from Williams’s show and incorporate them into her exhibition. This pattern of accumulation, rethinking, and rearrangement continues in subsequent rounds with Dean and Cruzvillegas. It’s a little like the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse, or the reality show Survivor, if you think of the objects in the room as castaways angling to make it to the end.

I like how this game invites the artists to work quickly with what’s available, to think but not overthink, and to translate the way they approach making objects to playing their hand with a show. The exhibition’s responsive, just-in-time structure runs counter to the long-term planning that goes into many institutional exhibitions and for this show, is a feature, not a bug. It makes room for ways of working akin to the maxim adopted by Allen Ginsberg, “First thought, best thought”: that your most spontaneous impulse, before you’ve had time to second-guess or “improve” it, is often the most alive. Institutions talk a great deal about taking risks; this is one way of doing it.

I invited these four artists because they are each drawn to how meaning shifts with context; their work is as concerned with how an object is constructed and positioned as with the object itself. What I don’t yet know, and am eager to find out, is how differently they’ll handle the constraints. Christopher Williams begins the game with walls: sculptures in their own right, but ones he’s told me the artists after him are free to hang their work on. Marked by earlier use, brought forward from past exhibitions, they carry a history of display into the room before the game’s rule of inheritance has even begun.

—Jenny Jaskey

The Game runs from September 26, 2026, to July 3, 2027.

• Player 1: Christopher Williams, September 26–November 29, 2026
• Player 2: Monika Baer, December 5, 2026–February 14, 2027
• Player 3: Aria Dean, February 20–April 26, 2027
• Player 4: Abraham Cruzvillegas, May 1–July 3, 2027

Rules of Play

1. Player 1 adds at least four objects to the gallery in an arrangement of their choosing.
2. Player 2 adds at least two objects to the gallery and leaves in place at least two objects from the previous exhibition. Players 3 and 4 will then follow the same protocol.
3. Each player has three days to install their exhibition. The exhibition, with the exception of any remaining objects, must be deinstalled over no more than two days.
4. Players may make temporary adjustments to the gallery’s physical qualities, such as lighting or paint color. Any adjustments to the gallery must be reversed within the deinstallation period, unless negotiated with all subsequent players.
5. Players will provide the public with a checklist identifying objects in the exhibition. They may provide additional information about the show if desired.

Between each round of The Game, the South Gallery will be closed to the public while artists install: December 3–4, 2026; February 18–19, 2027; and April 29–30, 2027.

The Game is curated by Jenny Jaskey, Chief Curator.

Special thanks to WKCR 89.9 FM.

Major support for contemporary exhibitions at Arts and Letters is provided by Patrick Collins.

Arts and Letters exhibitions are also made possible by the Childe Hassam Fund, the Eugene Speicher Fund, the Huntington Exhibition and Museum Fund, the Wolf Kahn Foundation, and members of Arts and Letters.