Truth or Drawer

A community game of honesty and audacity. Pick Truth and a gorilla brings you one on a silver tray. Pick Drawer and you have to go do something.

Modern Art

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You say Truth, and they sit you down on a couch. Then a person in a full gorilla costume comes out of the back and moves toward you with a silver tray held out flat, the way a waiter carries champagne. On the tray are old postcards, face down, each one with a sobering life-truth written by hand. You take one and read it. Somebody photographs you holding it. And then you're sitting on a couch in a room full of people, holding a hard sentence about being alive.

Libby Modern, who runs Modern Art in Lancaster, PA, can't remember the exact wording of any of the truths now, and she's honest that the whole thing was guesswork. “It was a total experiment,” she says. “We didn't know how it was going to go.” The truths ran along the lines of “Your desire to be successful in life is fueled by the need to be more powerful than the perception of others.” Things meant to spur somebody to think about their life and who they were.

The gorilla suit is not random. “The Truths were a way to confront a really difficult life question that maybe could be conceived of as dark or really heavy,” Modern says. “But it was done in this place that was really communal and whimsical and happy, and it was delivered by this gorilla. So it sort of puts people in this open space where they're more likely to be vulnerable and talk about it.” And they did talk. Sitting on the couch with a postcard in your hand, in a room where other folks are hanging around, the conversation starts itself.

Say Drawer instead and they walk you to an old library card catalog. Pull one drawer at random and there's a dare inside. Buy your neighbor a cup of coffee. Cover the mailbox with yarn. Write a poem for a friend. Find something in the studio and do something with it. One player got a small picture of a cat and had to write a poem about it and read it out loud, which they did, to a room that happened to be full at the time. Finish your dare and you get a little medal. The medal is a joke and also not, because being handed one in front of everybody is what makes a grown adult go ahead and bark at a page or cover a mailbox in yarn.

It ran over one weekend during Lancaster's ArtWalk, when the galleries stayed open and folks were already wandering. But you don't need a card catalog, or a gallery, to do it. The dares can just live on cards in a shoebox. What can't be skipped is the commitment: Truth or Drawer, decide now, no going back.

Sources

Truth or Drawer at Modern Art — Modern Art, Lancaster, PA. Photos of the original by Sara Code Kroll.

Interview with Libby Modern, July 2026.

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