January 2019's Post-it note art from Instagram

Over on our Instagram page, we’re posting a weekly installation from Clare Johnson’s Post-it Note Project, a long running daily project. Here’s her wrap-up and statement from January's posts.

January's Theme: I Would Never Assume

Here’s another set of post-its happily chosen by my award-winning-poet friend; we met 5 years ago through a fellowship that swept me off my feet with thorough efficiency, charmed and bolstered my writing-in-private self. I’ve never really had work colleagues in a typical sense, so I know many of my closest friends from school—college, sure, but also high school and middle school, and uh, maybe most especially kindergarten? Growing this close with someone I met so relatively recently, who actually works in MY SAME CREATIVE FIELD (and is so talented I would gush about her work even if we weren’t friends, you probably gush about it too) feels improbable and thrilling, like I know how to do something, like I can handle something I can’t always handle. This cold breath of relief, landing pockets of community despite all the everyday reminders of being outside the dominant main, can never count on the ease of relaxing in a group, caution and testing gently each new person, you wait, you have to wait and see. The larger world marginalizes the two of us for completely different identities, in all honesty those histories are not the same. It’s never the same. But together we’re miraculously safe to roll our eyes, all those horrifying moments that make laughing with a friend who knows it too the only thing to do, our whole bodies seized we’re laughing so hard about rough rough days, laughing that makes me clutch at my chest and wipe my eyes. She chose post-its about the “art life” here—of course—she laughed and chose the tiredness, the longing, the wishes and work. Working through illness when they give me steroids for my breathing and too worn down to notice any effect from them, on a deadline for a drawing, but god I love that drawing, thank goodness I made it, that drawing still leading to bigger and bigger days as we speak. Late nights teaching and tired too, but that lovely high schooler who took my classes all those years, quiet and growing, gave me a card with some Winslow Homer-type art print of ladies at the seaside, what a sweet moment. Drawing women in folds of big dresses hits some deep childhood satisfaction in me, there’s a delight when I sweep aside whatever else and draw, the swoopy skirts, I can’t make sense of that love, all I ever want to do is make more work, more time to make more. Please pay me for things, I’ll get to make more. The idea of being paid to make something where anybody can see for free, paid for the work and then everyone has access, art out in public bolstering everybody’s everyday, get me that job. I’m pessimistic and dreaming big. I did not assume anything, I know better than to think anybody in charge of the art money knows my little triumphs or yearnings. I would NEVER assume. I walk around like no one knows me, we’re just trying to keep it together, a million ideas everywhere I go, begging to bring it into being, pitching again and again for the chance to do that work to bring it into being, my million ideas. Share something, eat it in, pay our rent, find each other, roll our eyes.