Lenka Clayton
How We Thought It Would Be And How It Was
Atlanta, USA: J&L Books, 2025
48 pp., 29.2 x 24.2 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
My favorite representational works made using the typewriter come from Pittsburgh artist Lenka Clayton. Since 2012, she has produced more than five-hundred delicate drawings using a 1957 portable Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter.
This book collects twenty-three of them, made during the early days of the Covid pandemic. Subjects include the artist's grandmother’s thumb on the camera during a Zoom call, kitchen haircuts, quarantined mail, empty galleries, empty supermarket shelves, kitchen tea towels repurposed as face masks, and the ongoing struggle to remain optimistic.
The book shares its title with an online exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery. It is designed by Jason Fulford, who runs J&L Books with his partner Leanne Shapton.
How We Thought It Would Be And How It Was is available for $30 US from Printed Matter, here.
Clayton is featured in the season finale of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century, the first series on television in the U.S. to focus exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists. The episode is titled Human Nature and is slated to air later this month.
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