It’s fitting that Cameron Granger was born and raised in Euclid, Ohio, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland named for the Ancient Greek father of geometry, because the artist is interested in lines above all — lines visible and hidden, ancestral lines, and the angular, abstract sketchings of maps and urban planning. Granger is also a gamer, once a Playstation kid immersed in role-playing titles like Final Fantasy (1987–ongoing) and Breath of Fire (1993–ongoing), now an admirer of speedrunners who whip through a game with blazing efficiency. As a child, he spent countless hours at his grandparents’ house, watching his grandmother solve her daily crossword, focused on her as she focused on the lineated black-and-white grid.
Granger’s series Movements (all 2024), on view in his exhibition 9999 at the Queens Museum, is an homage to his grandmother’s ritual of puzzle-solving. Each silkscreen work features a crossword, the squares of this one filled with red pen, that one with blue, recalling the way a busy person might grab whatever tool available — it being the ritual, not the implement, that’s precious. Below each grid is less a set of discrete clues than an interconnected poem: Where a crossword clue normally opts for concision, and prods after some ill-formed blob of “common knowledge,” Granger’s clues overflow with emotion and personal history, asserting the worthiness of his grandma’s place in the puzzle’s cultural canon. She is often the clue’s referent, and the subject of its reverence: In “3rd Movement – Her Archive,” for instance, the answer to a certain clue — “It was blue, and covered in flowers. You massage her aching hands and tell her how pretty she looks in it. She doesn’t believe you” — is “DRESS.”
(2022), silkscreen on paper with pen, 22 x 24 inches (~55.9 x 61 cm) (photo by Kris Graves, all images courtesy the artist)
A straight line connects the personal and the political in Granger’s work as well — the lines of the crossword grid, zoomed out a little, are less a floorplan than a city map. The artist came of age in Columbus, observing the effects of city planning tactics wielded against poor Black residents. In the 1960s, in the wake of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, construction of the I-71 razed a historically Black neighborhood, cutting it off from the rest of the city. Those who could afford to left, and wealth drained slowly from the community. Grocery stores closed, schools got worse, property values plummeted, and public works projects disappeared.
Thus, in “1st Movement – Cartography Catastrophe,” the answer to the clue “Here, they constrict like throats. Messy lines that move us” is “INTERSTATE.” And such urban dislocation is mirrored by the rogue city planning of the crossword grid. A black square might prevent two words from crossing; a grid might flout the genre entirely and feature no intersecting words at all, just segregated islands of linguistic isolates.
Indeed, the negative image of the relentless game-players Granger admires is the single-minded, iron-fisted bureaucrat — the Robert Moses-type whose invisible hand can split the sea of a community, whose influence can seem if not biblical, then darkly conspiratorial. Games and urban planning, that is to say, are both about agency. In Games: Agency as Art (2020), the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen departs from the traditional analytic framework of comparing games to other mediums — praising a video game’s plot as “novelistic,” hailing its graphics as movie-like — and focuses instead, in an approach that models that of philosopher John Dewey, on the medium-specific experience of gameplay. In Nguyen’s telling, the true forbears of game designers aren’t writers or filmmakers, but process artists and urban planners. They attempt to “cope [with] and corral the agency of users, to achieve certain effects,” Nguyen writes. “Games are an artistic cousin to cities and governments.”
Granger’s refusal of the crossword grid’s conventions is thus also a refusal to accept the urban grid, and the constraints on agency it imposes. The crossword is ephemeral — solved and then discarded — but each of Granger’s framed puzzles arrives as a preserved, deliberate artifact. The dictionary overtness of standard clues is refused in favor of an obscure poetry that makes the viewer-solver work even harder, functioning as a kind of redaction. In the end, he refuses the very idea that a puzzle has a solution at all. Some of the clues don’t suggest a clear answer, and where there are answers, some are crossed out in a form of marking analogous to graffiti on a shiny new high-rise: illegible to the luxury developers who built it, but full of meaning to the community displaced by it.
Granger refers to this suite of refusals as “modding,” after the practice of modifying the look or mechanics of a video game, a cognate to the ways that low-income Black and Brown communities engineer their own ways of thriving within systems not built for them. In “4th Movement – Common American Bond,” 2-Down’s clue reads: “There ain’t no map that can take you here. It’s the arms length between you and your brother on the dance floor. It’s the tiny gaps between you and your lover’s skin when you fall into each other in the night. It’s the distance traveled between the plate & your mouth when your grandma makes your favorite meal.” The answer in the grid is crossed out. Looking closely, the letters behind the lines look like they spell HEAVEN, but it’s impossible to tell.
Cameron A. Granger: 9999 continues at the Queens Museum (Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens) through January 19. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cho.
