Every second and fourth Saturday at 11 pm at the rad Nighthawk Chicago in Albany Park. It’s outside on the patio, and it’s freeeee! See you Saturday?
Responsibilities: Concept, Design.
Poster
Digital banner
Social post
Blog
I got a new job, so here are late highlights from my old one
I started a new job in June as a senior content strategist and writer at a Chicago studio (also fully remote!). But between making that transition and traveling for several weeks throughout the month, I haven’t had a chance to post a proper update. Now the point feels moot, so instead I’ll share some of my final work for the college — interviews with recent alum and students. It was such a pleasure writing and editing for California College of the Arts, and I can’t wait to visit campus — and the beach — when I finally get out to the Bay later this year. 🙂
“Writers, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, filmmakers, painters, printmakers, movement practitioners. I’m here to tell you that you’re needed. I was recently having this conversation with one of my friends in the humanities and they said, ‘Well, we’re not curing cancer.’ And I thought, fuck that. I might be inspiring the person who does.“
“We have to honor that the environment already gave us those resources to produce those textiles and we need to honor those materials. They’re still useful and they’re beautiful. We just have to find innovative ways to use them. As a society, we consume so many things, all the time, that it won’t be possible to sustain. I like thinking about the hidden history of materials.“
“Yes, it is hard—and sometimes even terrifying—but it’s also delicious to be in charge of yourself, to not be subject to other people’s expectations of where you should go and what you should be.”
“Sometimes people get so careerist in the artistic sense; they think it is all being in the studio. But some of my best work and connections were more organic. It’s not something you can game. You have to figure out where the heat is and invest your time and energy—and make the work. So many people get caught up in what the secret is that they don’t have any work when they crack it.”
Stars aligned: Diedrick Brackens and Lauren O’Connell discuss their new exhibition
Best of last month’s macro.baby
My illustration a day project, dubbed macro.baby, continues. Through rain! Through shine! Through crippling sadness and/or shoddy window unit air conditioning!
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💥 A July giveaway 💥
Spend $75 or more on shop.jackiemantey.com this month and get a free print of “Pay Attention” (pictured above, to be mailed August 1). // Original image info: “Albanian Solider” (1906-1914) from photographer Augustus Sherman’s collection of photographs from Ellis Island, which is worth a scroll this Fourth of July weekend.
Have fun! Be free! Love your neighbor!
xoxo, Pride!
Hope your last day of Pride is a sexy ride! 💋🌈
This piece is, appropriately, a tease. More on this project soon…
New work: Toxic Waves comedy event
Check it out! Here’s some new collateral for Justin’s upcoming show at The Lincoln Lodge.
Responsibilities: Copywriting, naming, photography, and design.
Print poster
Social poster
Social announcement scroll
The “after times”: Turn, turn, turn
Pandemic is over. A new season has begun. Right? It feels like it. But it also feels as if we don’t know how to come out of something as a whole. For an event that happened to all of us at the same time, it also remains a reminder of how devastatingly singular we all can be.
Maybe it’s because we’re trying to come out whole in the first place. Why do that to ourselves? The past year or so was a massive fracturing of everything we thought we knew and understood. How does one recover from something one survived? That’s a question I’ve been trying to find an answer to my whole life.
Today I walked a mile to the dentist to get a crown put on to replace a temporary crown currently on one of my molars. Here’s a list of things I saw along the way: a man in biker shorts juggling three balls while running, a car with a giant Puerto Rican flag flying from the left passenger window and a giant Pride flag flying from the right one, and this flamingo bike:
I feel most like the man pointlessly juggling while running when what I really want to feel like is the person in the flag car. I’d settle for at least feeling like the flamingo.
By the time I arrived at the dentist, I checked my phone and saw they’d called several times. My crown hadn’t arrived yet. Someone in some factory somewhere is backed up and still making it, this fake cap for something inside me that rotted away while I sat inside and watched the news do anything but sit still.
Maybe we’ve been whole this whole time. Maybe we were rotten to begin with.
Either way, it feels nice to hold others in my arms again. To let them see my unmasked smile. Even if part of it is fake. Or at least temporary. For now.
I’ll walk back to the dentist next week.
Published: New art and writing in Intima
I’m excited to have a new essay and artwork featured in the Spring 2021 editing of Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine!
My essay, titled Sleep to Dream, is the story of how a recent medical diagnosis has been a surprising, missing plot point for several of my self-narratives.
“Fatigue is my kryptonite. The never-ending scramble for sleep is simply part of who I am. That was the story I told myself, anyway. Then I fell asleep while alone in a late-night Uber ride and finally admitted that slogging through these onslaughts of exhaustion was cause for concern.
That’s why I’m here, trying to make small talk with an uninterested sleep technologist pushing electrodes onto my head…“
~FIVE YEARS SOBER~
Five years is 1,825 days.
It’s 12 steps and two weekly meetups.
It’s one husband, three therapists, and a better best friend.
It’s a boost on a bad day.
It’s a confession on a good one.
It’s a letting go of all that was lost when drowned.
It’s noticing flowers bloom, leaves change, skin prickle, water bend, sirens howl, clouds melt, squirrels race, backs curl, dumplings steam, cake melt, chest tighten, pink glow, humility work, and truth help—for the first time, over and over.
It’s the distance it takes to be the same shape, stitching, color, and silhouette of spirit—turned right-side out.
It’s the whole of all that is countless.
Photo essay: Plants of my pandemic
I’m one shot deep into full inoculation. On my calendar, April 19, two weeks after our second shot, is circled in red, the outline of a wound, the unceremonious ending of a dread-full chugging along. I feel… complicated about it? I’ll be able to go hang out. Visit my masked neighbors. Be out again with people and friends. That makes me so happy but I am also shy about making plans, anxious about over-committing, afraid of under-committing. I feel like I have atrophied to my desk chair and the monotony of quarantine has emptied me, a hollowed tree trunk on its side. I have been growing behind a fence, having a conversation with myself in a gated space. And I feel trepidation about what to do once it is gone.
