Well known for novels such as Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and most recently Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023), Jonathan Lethem is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a professor of creative writing and English at Pomona College. He has also been a part of the contemporary art world for decades. Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play is a chronicle of an author who roams among visual artists.
The recent publication of Cellophane Bricks, Lethem’s first volume of collected art writings, is the genesis of this exhibition. The Benton will be featuring work from or related to his personal collection, often acquired in a fluid system of exchange with artists and galleries. Lethem has long made trades with visual artists—painters, sculptors, conceptual artists—in which their works are exchanged for his writing about them. Since his first words on Perry Hoberman’s sculptures, Lethem has worked in this way with artists such as Gregory Crewdson, Rosalyn Drexler, Charles Long, and Sylvie Selig, all featured in the exhibition. Visual artists such as Raymond Pettibon, Jonn Herschend, and Will Rogan have also sought out Lethem to contribute directly to their projects; such works are also included in the exhibition.
What is ultimately on display in Parallel Play is a call-and-response—between artists, between writing and the visual arts, between ideas and material forms. Lethem’s generous practice offers a model for thinking broadly about contemporary art and also about how the act of writing is intimately intertwined with the process of making physical objects.
