Jaydra Johnson Dot Com

Selected Writing

Selected Collage

Somebody Save Me

Limited edition artist’s book featuring collage from angel series and text, 2023. SOLD OUT.

Angel #17

Paper on porcelain, 2024.

Angel #11

Paper on porcelain, 2023.

Boys

Paper on paper, 2021.

Published in Sweet Tooth magazine, 2022

Angel #11

Paper on porcelain, 2023.

Real Estate

Paper on paper, 2023

All You’ve Lost

Paper on paper, 2020.

Published in Low: Notes on Art and Trash, 2024.

Nobody’s Home

Digital collage, 2022

Angel #1

Paper on porcelain, 2023

Jaydra Nicole Johnson
jaydranicole at gmail dot com
Instagram @jaydranicole

Writer - artist - educator
based in Portland, OR

Exhibitions and Commissions

Grapefruits Editions Exhibition and Microresidency- Collaboration with Martha Daghlian at ILY2too Gallery, Portland, OR 2024

HARK - Solo exhibition with Grapefruits Gallery at Mother Foucault's Bookshop, Portland, OR 2024

Quiet Moments - Dream Clinic Project Space, Columbus, OH 2023

Bed Stuy Featured Artists Exhibition- Herbert Von King Cultural Arts Center, Brooklyn 2023

Prayer Meeting - Bed Stuy Arthouse, Brooklyn 2023 (curator and artist)

The Patriot show - O'Flaherty's Gallery, NYC 2022

Finding Love in the Apocalypse - Atmos, digital 2022

The Future is Mutual - Atmos, digital 2021

Not Another Mom Group - The Motherbirth, digital 2021

Press

Award - Community of Literary Magazines and presses

Art Under Duress Panel - Calyx Press with Eula Biss and Elizabeth Cooperman

Dialogue - Intertext with Edy Guy

Dialogue - Fence with Lydia Mead

Interview - Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Interview - Textual Healing

Interview - Oregon Public Broadcasting

Interview - Another Fu*king Writing Podcast

Interview - The Show with NPR Phoenix

Review of Low - McKenzie Watson-Fore for Full Stop Magazine

"A Guide to Loving Trash" Review of Low - Matthew Trueherz for Portland Monthly

Portland's Most Anticipated Literary Events Fall 2024 - Matthew Trueherz for Portland Monthly

Author Q&A - for Seminary Co-Op Bookshop

Review of HARK - Kaya Noteboom for Variable West

Teaching

Creative Writing, Literature, & Composition - Hunter College 2021-present

K-12 Creative Writing Residencies- 826NYC 2021-2023

Weekly Poetry Workshop - 8 Ball Community 2020

High School and Dual Credit English (IRW 115 and WR 122) - Portland Public Schools 2016-2019, 2024-present

Education

MFA in Creative Writing
Hunter College

MA in Education
Lewis & Clark College

Last Updated 24.10.31

Low: Notes on Art & Trash

Fonograf Editions, 2024
Click here to purchase

Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance—and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson’s powerful memoir, Low—selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions’ inaugural essay collection contest—tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.

In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, “Low’s provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator—while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.”

An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

Click here to purchase.

Variable West
Cliff Notes Column

“As an art critic, I give a lot of grace to work that is strange yet unsuccessful. The casseroles might not be very good—someone’s nostalgic midwestern cream-of-mushroom mush, no doubt some diabolical vegan concoction—but I’d rather eat this shit than fill up on some bland, ad-copy version of dinner. Similarly, noise music can be a mess that’s hard to interact with and enjoy. Disquieting, uncomfortable experience is something we should all strive to incorporate more in our diets. Maybe it can help us fall in love again with the disorder of being human and fight with renewed vigor against the tyranny of a clean, corporate existence.“

[More...]

Portland Monthly
Freelance Arts & Culture Critic

“Later, ide showed me a corset she made from one of the discarded rugs. Without a cinch, it hung by its straps, flayed open. Its pattern and decorative fringe squarely conveyed its origin as a mat for wiping one’s feet. Like the cones, it called for a specific set of behaviors: stop, stomp, get clean before entering. These understood dictates applied in this new, corseted form suggested the similarities between a sexy, constricting garment for women and an object intended to be used, sullied, and eventually discarded. We had a lively discussion about whether the piece should be hung like a garment or laid on the floor like a carpet.“

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Lit Hub
Excerpt from Low

“Another of the books we read was House of Mirth, which was about a woman who would rather die than be poor, who in fact did die because of it. Lily Bart was obsessed with dinginess, with avoiding the horrible, gray life of working-class girls. Like many of her modern-day counterparts, working a thankless job and living in a boarding house turned Lily Bart into a drug addict, then into a drug casualty. Emma Bovary also died from the fear of being poor; the possibility scared her to death.“

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Guernica magazine

“I was reluctant to accept the good stuff at my local clinic in Portland, Oregon, though plenty of it was on offer. OxyContin, Klonopin, Vicodin, Valium. I used to mix these pills with golden mouthfuls of malt liquor and cheap whiskey slugged straight from heavy glass bottles, and I had learned not to trust myself under their influence.“

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Epoch
Casting, interviews, and text for photo essay by Harley Weir and Lana Lackey

“In Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence wrote that “The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs… And a woman had to yield.” Because of this historic dynamic, wherein feminine desires are muted in the face of heterosexual, masculine power, women’s erotic lives—particularly their interiors—remain a mystery, sometimes even to women themselves.“

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Oxford American
Music Criticism

“What makes a song carry us? What makes a song make us whole even when we don’t understand all the words?“

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