The Game

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 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, which, 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 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.