Lenka Clayton

Since 2012, Lenka Clayton (born 1977) has (mis)used the typewriter as a drawing tool. To this date, she has made over 500 typewriter illustrations by using only the letter and punctuation keys on a standard mechanical typewriter. How We Thought It Would Be and How It Was presents 23 of these drawings, executed on a 1957 portable Smith-Corona Skyriter on antique, letter-size typewriter paper. Each drawing carries physical traces of the making process, including folds that enable the paper to move in all directions through the carriage. The subjects are all drawn from direct observation of daily life Clayton experienced during the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, including her grandma’s thumb on the camera during a Zoom conversation, empty supermarket shelves and the remnants of tea towels that were hastily cut up to make homemade masks.

In the archives of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pittsburgh-based artist Lenka Clayton (born 1977) came across a letter written in 1978 by a member of the public to the curator of 20th-century art. The writer—a Mr. Brian H. Morgan—describes a white marble egg made by his Romanian great-grandfather Peter Finck. He notes a startling similarity between this egg and Brancusi’s “Sculpture for the Blind,” in the museum’s collection. The letter poses this question: “What is it about Brancusi that makes his egg a work of art suitable for a museum, and not the egg by Finck?” At its heart is a timeless question: how does one object come to be understood as an important work of art, while another, so similar, is entirely forgotten? Clayton found the letter almost 40 years after it was written and discovered that it was never answered. She sent a copy of the letter to 1,000 curators, museum directors and other art professionals, inviting them to imagine that the letter was addressed to them and to respond to Mr. Morgan.