����AV

Jonathan Lethem, Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English, is best known for his many critically acclaimed novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude and Brooklyn Crime Novel. Last July, Lethem published his first volume of art writings titled Cellophane Bricks, “a kind of stealth memoir of his parallel life in visual culture,” according to the book description.

In the process of writing about artists, Lethem has often exchanged his words for works from the visual artists. Now, his book has spawned a new exhibition at the Benton Museum of Art at ����AV titled Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play: Contemporary Art and Art Writing. Co-curated with Solomon Salim Moore, academic curator at the Benton, the show features many of the artists Lethem has worked with over several decades.

We sat down with Lethem to talk about the exhibition. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

How did this show come about?

I think Victoria [Sancho Lobis, director of the Benton Museum] really spurred it. I definitely had some fantasies about showing some of the work connected to this book, but they felt like fantasies; it was a book project, which is what I know how to do. Nevertheless, in order to write it I had to do a material reckoning—locating all the artwork that I wanted to write about. I was framing pieces that were hiding in portfolios, and putting things on walls, living with things differently, and in a way, acknowledging that I’d become a kind of art collector through this process of writing about so many artists. The materiality of the objects beckoned, in a way, to this possibility of the exhibition.

Still, I’d never been a curator before. I love museums, but I don’t have a sense of proprietorship. I’ve been just someone who’s wandered through them, like a cat wanders through a house. I had to leap a little threshold of disbelief. So much of the material is eccentric and made by artists that I know and came of age with. I still didn’t know what it would feel like to assemble this show, or how big it would be, or what my role would be exactly. The idea that I was going to be titled as a co-curator was another leap.

I understand that most of your writing about art in the book is fiction. How does that work?

There are many things in the book, but yes, there’s a great number of pieces that are fictional instead of essayistic. Usually, a writer who agrees to write about an artist commits something more like art writing. The art is addressed in a more literal way. I preferred to do something more like what I usually do, which is write stories. When people asked me to write about their work, I’d often come back at them with this proposal. The interesting thing was, no one ever said, “Oh no, that's not what we want.” It always seemed exciting to people.

There is some element of me interpreting, even if it’s somewhat allegorically, what I’ve learned about their art and their practice. In other cases, it was more fanciful. It depended on the artists. It depended on the degree of my contact with them, the angle of my contact with them.

But other pieces in the book are more like essays, and I began to see that as much as writing about the art, when gathered they revealed an autobiographical impulse. These were descriptions of my intricate, often indirect but constant, personal relationship to the visual arts. My father is a painter—his work in the show. I trained as a visual artist. So there’s also a path-not-taken theme here. My writing about art represented my continued sense of investment or alliance with these artists, and with the whole project of visual and material art-making. I was exercising my vicarious appetite to be in the studio, to be thinking about visual things even though I wasn’t making visual things.

So the artists you feature are ones you came of age with?

In a few cases they were people I knew in high school or college, people I was in art school with. But even after, in my 20s, when I was starting to write, I fell in very readily with artist friends, and in a couple of cases, fell in love with artists. Some part of me was trying to stay in that milieu, even as I was abandoning it.

What are your reactions to the exhibition?

I’m still pinching myself. I’m still believing that it’s real. I’ve looked at these pieces in informal settings—mostly my home—for a long time. Yet some of it’s never even been framed until the show.

What are your hopes for what people will take from the show?

I’m excited for people to make contact with it, and I’m going to be listening. I think there are a lot of open doors and windows, a lot of apertures in this group of objects and the way they interrelate. There are a lot of unexpected connections that emerged even as we were assembling it, relationships that weren’t even necessarily activated within the book, which got activated when the objects themselves were in a conversation.

This whole project has had from the very beginning—before I even knew I would have a book, let alone a museum show—an origins in a kind of give-and-take, and collaboration. It was about writers and artists talking. It was about making objects open up their secrets and trying to decant them into language. It remained very deeply collaborative with me and Salim and the museum staff. So now that continues. Now it’s a collaboration with the viewer. I see it as rolling into a conversation with anyone who wants to engage.

“Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play” will be on view at the Benton Museum of Art at ����AV from February 13 to June 29, 2025. An artists panel and opening will take place on February 15 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.