Reading Tomorrow 📅, New Writing, Multidisciplinary, Recommendation

Hello!

This newsletter highlights tomorrow's reading, shares a bit on multidisciplinarity, shares new writing, a bit about a project that is aching to emerge, highlights what I'm teaching for The Loft this Spring, recommends an exhibition, shares some thoughts when I say yes to artistic collaborations, mentions that this could be the topic of an artist career consultation with me, or with others.

My hope is that this newsletter integrates my practice as a whole a bit; connects you to lots of things I'm working on, noticing or thinking about; and provides some content that isn't elsewhere (yet). You may know me mostly as a disabled visual artist, as an essayist or storyteller or solo performer, or Work of Art business skills for artists facilitator, my practice is really varied, and I know I typically have just let that exist versus explaining or justifying it.

Reading Tomorrow (!) Friday January 10th in person in Minneapolis

I'll be reading in Minneapolis tomorrow Friday, January 10th at 7:30pm from an article I wrote last Spring for MNopedia on Lydia B. Angier, who was a patient at Rochester State Hospital from 1896 to 1899, as well as other works related to hospitals and care. Tickets are $20, (if that's a stretch for you, just come on out as my guest). I'll also have art, prints, zines and other ephemera available for sale. Doors at 6:30pm. Bianca and Jacob of Beatrix*Jar will be there off duty - selling art and supporting audio for the reading. Also, check out their fundraiser here.

Details in one spot:
Lit Reading on Care Systems by Alison Bergblom Johnson
In-Person in Minneapolis
Friday 1/10/2025, 7:30pm
A-Mill Artist Lofts, Performance Hall
315 SE Main St.
Minneapolis MN 55414

Some access details: Enter at the double staircase entrance on Main Street, if you need a ramp please email me ahead to get the code to dial in. Street parking is cheapest on 2nd St SE, or on the other side of university. There is also a ramp at 2nd St and 2nd Ave SE, enter from 2nd Ave SE, then walk down 2nd st, turn right at 3rd ave, and down the hill, then left at Main.

Multidisciplinarity

As an artist who works across disciplines I definitely notice the multiplicity of terminology other similar artists use to describe their practices. People choose to use words like artist, adisciplinary, interdisciplinary. Of these, I most resonate with the first two. Also, as an aside I've been envisioning pitching an essay entitled "I don't see genre/disciplines/media" equating the love of genre or medium fidelity with color-blind racism, with the folks who tell me I don't think of you as disabled, or who always want me to pass as abled. (If this is something you're interested in commissioning, feel free to reach out!)

About a month ago I sat down for an oral history interview about my career thus far as a disabled artist. One of the many things we spoke of was how important to me using multidisciplinary as a descriptor is because it emphasizes multiplicities of meanings. As in Walt Whitman and his multitudes, as in to be disabled means I will always be viewed as non-normative, but this culture keeps creating more disability, and so there will always be more of us, multitudes of us, and as in dissociation, in what was once called Multiple Personality Disorder (a diagnosis by the way that I don't have, although I do experience dissociation). I've often felt just make the work, let it fan out in front of an audience that also participates in the meaning making project of it, and I'm trying to find ways to speak a bit more about what the work is, why it is this way, and how I experience and propagate modes of making.

New Writing: Essay in Selfitudes, an art historical exploration of the selfie

While there's no Good Housekeeping stamp of approval on this practice, and most online publications fretting about (or defending) #funeralselfies are from 2013 or 2015, a friend and I took one anyway. Read Selfie at a Funeral on Selfitudes, which is a newsletter that I currently am writing on Substack. It's a place to both treat the selfie, a medium often derided for self-reference, as too sexy, as too popular culture to be taken seriously. I do have a new post prepping that will be an image, one or two thoughts, sort of a fast selfie. I'll be experimenting with frequency and consistency on this project, but I can imagine perhaps a weekly schedule.

Disabled Next Tuesday, a podcast, a space on Patreon

I've been playing with what this will be, but I was disabled last Tuesday, and I'll be disabled next Tuesday. There are often ways disability is part of the news, but its rare that anyone is doing deep dives, teasing apart how disability affects coverage, affects the people involved and what happens because of it. These are some of the reasons I hope Disabled Next Tuesday to be a space I'm publishing more often. I don't have a precise timeline, but if this interests you please check out the Patreon.

Upcoming Loft Classes with Me

• Improv Workshop for Writers: Exploring Interactive Methods to Draft and Revise in 6 Weeks starts Wednesday January 29, 2025
• Sampler Class: Creative Nonfiction with Alison Bergblom Johnson Online February 4, 2025
• Double-Session Class: Internet Research for Nonfiction Writers, Memoirists, Biographers and Family Historians February 22 & March 1, 2025

Go and See: Super Deluxe at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis

Adisciplinary artist Cameron Patricia Downey exhibition is up through January 25, and I so encourage you to get out for it.

From the description:

Super Deluxe circles and jaunts around codes of luxury, pleasure, service and gameplay by a jostling of material, personal recollection, flavor and motion itself. In a sociopolitical context wherein the concept of wealth has footed itself entirely on a project of expropriation and dispossession, the ‘luxurious’ becomes a station riddled with precarity. What is ‘fabulous’ and what is ‘Ghetto Fabulous’ often is in constant, if not eternal flux.

Saying Yes

I've been thinking a lot about what I say yes for, and what turns me off in collaboration, in professional opportunity. I know that I prefer a formal ask via email, with details, what is it, what's payment, when's payment, what's my responsibility, what's yours. I know, from friends, from my artist career consultation practice that artists are so different from each other in what works and doesn't. It's occurred to me that knowing what you need to get to yes could be a topic of an Artist Career Consultation. If that might be helpful sign up via Springboard for the Arts.

Consults are low-cost, free for Minnesota artists, and you get to spend dedicated time with an experienced artist about an element of your practice you want to talk about. Other reasons for a consult: you're considering applying for a specific opportunity, and want proposal writing help, you're dreaming and want to prioritize what to work on next, or there's a challenge in your practice you want another eye on.

Thanks for reading til the end!

You've read to the end! Thank you. If you'd like to read recent issues (Jan 2 and Dec 26) or forward it to a friend. Sign up to receive it in your email box every week here.

Warmly, Alison