A handful of Mysterious Letters will be read out on the Charlie Woolley Radio Show this weekend. More information here.

"How do we experience a work of art when we have not seen it? Acoustic Mirrors invites speakers from a diverse array of backgrounds and members of the public to reflect on the conceptual and physical distribution of art today. Acting as the focal point for the exhibition, the Charlie Woolley Radio Show will play host to a diverse range of guests including Lenka Clayton, Patrick Coyle, Alfredo Cramerotti, Michael Crowe, Doug Fishbone, Karen Di Franco, Sam Fenton-Elstone, Tom Godfrey, Seth Guy, James Harkin, Jaimie Hodgson, Homeland, Toby Huddlestone, Jeremy Hutchison, Kelly Large, Lisa Le Feuvre, Pierre Leguillon, Claudia Molitor, Garrett Phelan, Daniel Ploeger, Postworks, Aura Satz, and Christopher Kulendran Thomas, amongst others."

A new wrapped kite which will be posted around the world from gallery to gallery until sold, has left Pittsburgh, been exhibited in Cologne, and is now on its way to a gallery in Moscow. Good luck little friend.

Mysterious Letters has opened a new shop with four things in. Please drop in.

catalogue here

tour places & dates:

SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh PA, December 2, 2011 – January 29, 2012

Bowling Green State University Galleries, OH, August 28 – October 7, 2012

The Marlin and Regina Miller Gallery, Kutztown University, PA, October – November 18, 2012

Wells College, Auburn NY, Spring 2013

Harris Art Gallery, University of La Verne, La Verne CA, September-October 2013

Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Baltimore, MD, Mid-March to end of April, 2014

UC Art Museum, Boulder, CO, September 2014 - mid-December 2014, with symposium

Mark Dion selected a group of artefacts from two Danish town museums. He decribed the object's physical traits in handwriting on the back of postcards that he sent to twelve artists across the USA. The descriptions were treated as instructions to recreate the unseen object. The new objects were shipped back to Denmark and exhibited in a Medieval Tower. The pages above show the description and artefact that I made.

Snowy parking space & God's Eyes.

Sculpture made when Michael Crowe & Lenka Clayton were 34 years & 136 days old.

Michael Crowe & I are in a group show curated by Elodie Royer & Yoann Gourmel in FRAC, Paris. A new series of "Same Age Sculptures" are being shown, one pair for each day of the exhibition. Free catalogue to download here.

"the collective exhibition The Feeling of Things takes as its point of departure the work and spirit of the inventor, artist, designer, writer, illustrator, graphic designer and teacher, Bruno Munari, “a Peter Pan with the calibre of a Leonardo”... More found here or here. also exhibiting; Isabelle Cornaro, Julien Crépieux, Robert Filliou, Martino Gamper, Ryan Gander, Mark Geffriaud, Ray Johnson, Chitti Kasemkitvatana, Cyrille Maillot, Bruno Munari, Emilie Parendeau, The Play, Bruno Persat, Pratchaya Phinthong, Chloé Quenum, Clément Rodzielski, Fred Sandback, Mieko Shiomi.

published by Simultanhalle, Germany.

At the Carnegie Museum of Art more

...arrived today in Volkhoven, Cologne, Germany.

At 2.30pm on the 10th of July I will be giving a talk about my work, in particular my new piece "Maternity Leave", at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Details are here, hope to see you there!

The Pittsburgh Biennial opens tonight! I will be showing a newly commissioned work "Maternity Leave" at the Carnegie Museum of Art, curated by Dan Byers. The show runs until September 18th 2011.

"Maternity Leave is a durational, private performance that takes place in the artist’s home and is transmitted via audio to the artist’s traditional place of representation, the museum. Over the course of the Pittsburgh Biennial, Lenka Clayton, commissioned to make a new art work, will be at home looking after her newborn baby. The Carnegie museum will pay her a monthly maternity benefit equivalent to the Maternity Allowance she is eligible for, but separated from in her home country; England. Maternity Leave reveals and considers overlapping cycles of responsibility; of government to citizen, institution to artist, artist to audience, parent to child, and audience to artwork."

Repairing Lebanon will be published in a new book by Susanne Slavick. Out of Rubble considers the aftermath of war from decimation to regeneration through the work of thirty international artists.

I'm delighted that Repairing Lebanon is part of the book Art & Agenda, Political Art and Activism, just published by Gestalten.

People in Order (Love) will be shown in the Flaherty Seminar Program this Valentines Day at the Anthology Film Archives at 7.30pm.

Mysterious Letters was funded $3956 today! Thank-you to the one hundred and twenty-two wonderful backers. Your rewards are on the way, we're just deciding where to bury the treasure owed to ten of you, and looking up the number of syllables a Haiku* has to have. More soon!

*(17)

(read 585 more)

On the 11th of December Michael Crowe and I will be talking to Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter about Mysterious Letters, at the New Museum.

For the next year I will be Artist in Residence at the wonderful Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

I was invited back to Alfred University, to present my work & meet graduate students as part of their Studio Visits program.

A new project "Amish Memories of Television" commissioned by Britta Peters has been published in a special edition of the magazine Multitudes.

Most Effective at Mystifying an Entire Village: Lenka & Michael, Mysterious Letters

Mysterious Letters is a project by Lenka and Michael, two artists who’ve decided to write everyone in the world a personal letter, one town at a time. In April they mailed everyone in a small Irish village a letter on the same day, and in November they did the same with a Pittsburgh neighborhood called Polish Hill. The aftermath, as we carefully detailed in this blog post, was enormous: tons of befuddled press (the BBC devoted five minutes to it — the broadcast is their project’s pitch video) and equally baffled letter recipients.

Among the anecdotes in the press reports was this amazing passage:

Anna Misiaszek, who runs Alfred’s Deli Plus with her husband, said the letter that arrived at their shop seemed silly. It read: “Next time someone tries to bamboozle you with the cup and ball trick (on holiday in Turkey, at a city bus station …) choose the cup on the right.”

“This is something crazy. I treat this like a joke,” she said Tuesday.

She initially tore up the letter and tossed it in the trash, but later retrieved it when she was told it was an art project.

Our final favorite bit? After the last mailing, signs began appearing all over Polish Hill proclaiming simply, “Don’t worry, it was an art project.”

By Yancey Strickler one of Kickstarter's founders, writing for the Kickstarter Blog

New solo exhibition opens at Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, 10th September 2010.

The Spoken Word Archive, an ongoing archive of every word spoken over the course of a day by a series of individuals across the city, has received a seed award from Pittsburgh's Sprout Fund.

The first manifestation of the archive will be shown at Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts in September 2010.

"The Sprout Fund enriches the Pittsburgh region’s vitality by engaging citizens, amplifying voices, supporting creativity and innovation, and cultivating connected communities.  Founded in 2001, Sprout facilitates community-led solutions to regional challenges and supports efforts to create a thriving, progressive, and culturally diverse region.  With strong working relationships to many community organizations and regional stakeholders, The Sprout Fund is one of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s leading agencies on issues related to civic engagement, talent attraction and retention, public art, and catalytic small-scale funding.  With ongoing local support and continued appreciation by the communities it serves, The Sprout Fund will continue to catalyze creative solutions to pressing challenges, engage people in community conversations, respond to the needs of its target audiences, open doors to civic participation, and promote responsible stewardship of community interests."

Mysterious Letters were sent to all 620 residents of the neighbourhood of Polish Hill, Pittsburgh. Please visit www.mysteriousletters.blogspot.com to read all letters and the local reaction.

A series of four films I made on the working practices of artists Clifton Wright, Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye, Doreen McPherson and Mauwena Kattah of the artist group intoart will be shown in the exhibition See the Revolutionary Art Exhibit at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. 7th November - 6th December 2009. The films were made according to instructions given in a series of questionnaires by the artists. They will be posted on this website soon.

I'll give a short presentation of work at Dorkbot, Pittsburgh.

The Repairing Lebanon series will be shown as part of an installation curated by VVork at the 3rd Fotofestival Mannheim, Germany, opening in October 2009.

Today I will move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania!

Zweifel and a new sculpture, BerlinBerlin, will be shown in Reconstructed Zone at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, 04/09/–08/11/2009.

please click here to read all the letters or here to find out what on earth, why etc. (and to watch our mysterious letters being opened on the BBC Northern Ireland news).

Article in the Higher Education Chronicle about my recent residency in Upstate New York. Please click here

The finished blog of stories from Allegheny County, New York. 

The Times, Saturday 11th April 2009.

Michael Crowe and I will be realising our latest collaboration “Mysterious Letters” during a two week residency founded by Bill Drummond in Curfew Tower, Northern Ireland.

"Mysterious Letters is a collaboration between artist Lenka Clayton and writer, Michael Crowe. We aim to send each inhabitant of a small British town a personal hand written letter. The letters will be positive in spirit, differing greatly in form and content. These beautiful unsolicited letters will prompt neighbourly discussion that will spread across the town, promoting community curiosity. When compared between neighbours, no two will be the same.

The art work consists solely of the discussion between the recipients about what on Earth these letters are, who sent them and why, etc. On completion it will be announced in the national press."

People in Order received an HONORABLE MENTION FOR HUMANIZING STATISTICS at this year's Flex Festival!

Our film Conversation will be shown at the Iranian International Documentary Festival in Tehran this October.

My new project made front page news! Please see Amnesty for the Museum for full description.

I have been awarded the Theodore Randall International Chair position at Alfred University, New York State, America. I am currently living there, working on a new body of work and running a project with the students to make a start a brand new town museum.

if you want to read about life in upstate New York have a look here: http://alfreddiary.blogspot.com

James and I will be involved in a group exhibition based on the rules of the Learning to Love You More website by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. The show is curated by Nicky Peacock and will be held in the co-operative buildings in Middlesbrough, England.

Ein Leben Lang curated by and exhibited at NGBK, Berlin

James Price and I will be showing our series People in Order as part of this exhibition critiquing the depiction of the ageing process in Western cultures. Each 3 minute programme will be showing on its own monitor with the films running concurrently.

Also showing: Birgit Brenner, Baldur Burwitz, Donigan Cumming, Evelina Deicmane, John Coplans, Regine von Felten, Margie Geerlinks, Peter Granser, Friederike Kersten, Felix Pestemer, Annegret Soltau, Miwa Yanagi.

Clayton & Crowe

Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe are an artist led collaboration based in London, working with sculpture, photography and text. Their aim is to mix and muddle their different approaches to writing, storytelling and art practice. Past projects include Text Message Archive , 2005, a project made on the first day that they met. The artists agreed to exchange exact transcriptions of all the text messages they received during a given period, regardless of content. This project explored notions of privacy and exposure. Current and future projects include Same Age Sculptures, 2008, a series of sculptures made when the artists were the exact same age. Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe produced them all blindfolded, in order to remove aesthetic anxiety, and to emphasize elements of surprise and play. Michael, being older by 34 days made one a day, for 34 days. Then Lenka began, and 34 days/sculptures later her first piece was coupled with Michael's first piece, second with second, and so on. They explain: “Age is frequently used to compare what two people have accomplished, creating a winner and a loser. This work gently throttles that belittling system. The most interesting pair of sculptures will be cast in bronze.”

In their next collaboration, Mysterious Letters, the artists will send every inhabitant of a small town a personal hand written letter, composed in Bill Drummond's artist's residency, Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland, over a period of two weeks in December. Each one, heartening in aspirit, will arrive on exactly the same day and will differ greatly in form and content. When compared between neighbours, no two will be the same. The unsolicited mail will prompt neighbourly discussion that will spread across the town, promoting community curiosity.

By Emilia Telese

please see http://www.lenkaclayton.co.uk/gallery.php?gallery=sameage for the whole Same Age Sculpture project.

Conversation (co-directed with James Price) will be shown at Hotdocs documentary festival in Toronto.