Late Summer Art 2025 Updates

Hello, friend!

When you have a chronic illness, I'm learning that time moves differently. My days are as remarkably similar as they are predictable. I take 7 pills shortly after I wake up. After I eat breakfast, I down 15 pills. Throughout the rest of my day, alarms go off every few hours for more medicine. I boil an iron fish everyday and then with that iron-infused water, I add cheap but highly effective electrolytes that contain three times as much salt as the recommended daily allowance. The secret is that that amount of salt has been a game changer in terms of reducing my rapid heart rate and palpitations. So counter-intuitive, and yet, it’s exactly what I needed, and I figured it out through experimentation and lots of research. Kind of like how I make art. Which maybe you had started to wonder when I would get to the art, since this is after all, an art newsletter.

But art is always bound up with our lives. Creativity comes more easily to some of us when we’re calm and supported. Others of us creatively thrive when life is at its worst and we can take our ache and make it sing. I tend toward the former, which has made these last five years of living through a novel pandemic, an uprising for racial justice, a new chronic illness, multiple genocides and wars, and the economic insecurity many of these things have wrought in my life a detriment to my creative process. 

And yet, I have adapted my process. I have continued to create. I have learned to see my creativity as it ripples throughout my whole day, integrated into my life and the myriad adaptations I enact in order to live my life with an energy limiting disability. 
Last year, I reached out and asked others about their experiences adapting their practices. I moved at a glacial pace, but I did eventually make a printed physical ‘zine (there’s also a digital PDF available that includes many full-color versions of the included artworks!) called ADAPT: A Zine About How To Keep Making Art. I hope that you check it out - there are incredible essays from artists living with chronic illnesses, interviews with people navigating parenthood and caring for aging parents, advice and rituals for continuing to make art despite obstacles, and lots of really inspiring and thoughtful artworks. 
And if this idea speaks to you, please reach out! I would love to hear how you, too, have adapted your practice, and I’m thinking about making a Part 2!

In other big life news, I recently was laid off from my position as Learning and Instruction Specialist in STEM/Computer Science Education with the Science Museum of Minnesota. This is due to federal budget cuts, ongoing pandemic problems, and fiscal mismanagement - nearly 40 people were laid off with me, so it was not a small thing. For me, mainly this is big news because I have been working for the museum for nearly 17 years, and because it was hugely helpful that I was able to receive generous ADA accommodations to continue working these last few years while I’ve been dealing with Long Covid. I am quite sad that this is how my tenure there has ended, but I am also proud of all that I accomplished - as an educator as well as my impact on the museum culture. While I was not directly responsible for unionizing and I was too sick to participate much in the union, I am extremely grateful that I was able to be part of unionizing our workplace. I am also very glad to have my union there for me during this process of separation. Twenty-nine of the laid off workers are in the union, and they have set up a Go Fund Me to help us until we transition into new opportunities. As an added incentive, I am offering anyone who donates at any amount a 4”x6” print of this drawing I created in 2021 based on the book by Sarah Jaffe - “Work will never love you back.” To claim your print, share with me your GFM receipt and your address, and I’ll enthusiastically send it to you! And thank you for supporting, sharing, and spreading the word about our fundraiser. I know there are many very important and critical causes to donate to, mutual aid efforts to support, and necessities in your own life to take care of with our limited funds, so I am always deeply grateful when you have a little extra to put towards causes that are meaningful to me.

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