Time lapse photo from the opening of the exhibition Disability Justice Now in July 2024. Photo Credit: Chris Juhn

Disabled Artist, Unapologetic Art

Creating multidisciplinary work in service to survival, amplification, and community

Alison Bergblom Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist whose work contains disability and joy. She collaborates with numerous community care and art organizations (some examples: Fresh Eye Gallery, Strike Theater, the Loft Literary Center, Springboard for the Arts, and the Walker Art Center).

Alison Bergblom Johnson performing at the opening for the exhibition Disability Justice Now with her emotional support balloon Walter. Photo Credit: Chris Juhn, 2024.

Her collage, storytelling and essays often approach taboo topics including disability and sexuality in inclusive ways. Topics she's addressed in her work include the Craigslist personals, traumatic experiences including sexual violence, gender, mental health treatment, and the stories we tell ourselves and our loved ones about stigmatized experiences.

Artwork

Artist Statement

There is a multiplicity of terminology artists whose practice is more expansive than one medium use to describe their work. People choose words like artist (entirely sidestepping discipline), multidisciplinary, postdisciplinary, adisciplinary, interdisciplinary. My work is multidisciplinary.

Multidisciplinary as a descriptor emphasizes multiplicities of meanings, of practices, of commitments, of objects, of forms, of influences.

My work is personal, often addresses that which is supposedly private, and the disconnects between how individuals find ways to live inside experiences that are stigmatized deeply beyond simple denial, inside government or community stories that are not as expansive as their own might be. I am inspired by poet Walt Whitman, by dancer Bill T. Jones, by poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, by artist Tracy Emin, by photographer Cindy Sherman, and poets Mark Doty and Maggie Nelson, activist Rigoberta Menchu, and artist Dread Scott, and so many others. Like James Baldwin, the artists whose lineage I place myself in rigorously craft from the personal, the small, individual, as perceived and experienced details, and are always looking back outward to each other, to community, to those who are also hurting, and who are also finding comfort and joy.

See below for example projects. For a more complete list, please see Projects.

Collage

Three artworks (“Washed Out Bubble Gum Pink Asks Their Doctor,” “The best bubblegum pink does medication risks and benefits,” and “Ink Blue Remembers the Doctor Writing Out a Dosage Schedule”) as installed for The Art of Disability Justice Now at Mill City Museum in Minneapolis.

Other ways to access Alison's collage include the MPLSart 2021 sketchbook and Twin Cities Collage Collective's North Star Exhibition (Alison's work).

Theater

Mixed Blood Theatre commissioned twelve artists to create a performance piece with twelve different communities in Minneapolis and St. Paul (and surrounds) in 2023. I worked with others from the disability community to create a fifteen-minute performance showing how disabled people support other disabled people on any given day.

Essays and Creative Nonfiction

Feedback received regarding my essay 'A Self that Doesn't Stay on Brand,' originally published by the now defunct Entropy's Woven series of creative nonfiction essays on #metoo stories. I'm incredibly proud to have been part of that series and for my work to have landed.

Other recent essays include Long Live the Disabled Artist, Long Live the Disabled Artist(s), (published in Mn Artists) and What Are the Accommodations of Your Dreams?, (published in the Walker Reader). In addition to entries in MNopedia, "Death of Anna Salzer in Rochester State Hospital, 1897" and "Commitment and Guardianship of Lydia B. Angier, 1896–1907."

Curation

I curated CabarABLE with a focus on Rights/Responsibilites in 2016 for Patrick's Cabaret (promo video). I had a long relationship with Patrick's Cabaret including performing in many open call cabarets and also serving as a FUNeral Director when the organization sunset. For more information about the Cabaret, see their archive at the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Subjects I Engage With

Disability

I'm a disabled artist. While I've experienced disability since I was very young, I did not grow up knowing I was part of this community. Disability is a frequent topic in my work, and organizing, supporting and being with other artists with disabilities is important to me. I hold a disability justice perspective, and I also believe the promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 has not yet been fully realized.

Gender

My work has often explored cultural restrictions determined by gender, and documented what it is like living in a society that cares about gender. I'm also interested in affirmative and liberatory interactions with cultural ideas of gender. I am a cisgendered woman, inclusion is crucial generally, and in the specific for our transgender and nonbinary siblings.

Mental Health

I've centered mental health in my art making in numerous ways. For instance, my storytelling and installation project about the culture and history of the Craigslist personals documents the manic side of bipolar disorder. Press coverage from Minn Post and the Minneapolis Star Tribune highlighted this project.

Sexuality and Joy

As humans our bodies sometimes do hold the effects of trauma and exclusion, but we also desire, we also love, we also show up for each other. Pleasure and joy matter, including physically. As I hold and offer conceptions of disabled joy, I am indebted to the many Black scholars, artists and organizers who have practiced and emphasized Black joy.

What Are Artists? Where Are Artists?

To be an artist now is a job description that simply keeps expanding, we do things an influencer, a model, a comedian, a journalist, an entrepreneur, a tv star, a socialite, a motivational speaker, a designer might do. I keep thinking of writer Joyce Carol Oates speaking of how many fret about how many books she writes (she seems to think people think it too many) and wonder at how it could be that she writes too many books when she spends so much time staring out windows.

Some of what I do means people call me brave, or wise, or fantastic, and I get uncomfortable with such labels, and enthusiasm. I so hope you get obsessed with the art I make, the experience of it, and that it creates an opening for you in your own thinking, making or being.