Bio: I’m Allyson. You can call me Al. I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately reading the bios of various artists, from the infamous to the obscure. Most of them sound professional. I decided that if I was going to have a bio, it was going to sound like me.

I went to fancy-pants contemporary art school. While I was there, I tried to be: intellectual, deeply meaningful, cutting edge, praiseworthy. Usually, I failed. It took a long time for me to remember that making art, thinking about art, is fun. But fun is a deceptive word. Or maybe it is the wrong word. Making art allows every day to be meaningful even as it is heartbreak and alienating. A vast landscape without a map.

I love maps, timelines, graphs—especially if they explicate the abstract, the complicated or the inexplicable. I am not a big fan of capitalization, paragraphs or pencils. I am currently listening to Tilly & the Wall's Bottoms of Barrels.

I took a special trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the work of Marcel Duchamp, in particular his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. I, with a few collaborators, created a response piece entitled The Attempted Execution of The Bastard, Desire. Marcel Duchamp is my favorite dead white man, although T.S. Eliot gives him a run for his money. I once organized a costume party where we all dressed up like personages—literary, political, fictional—from the early part of the 20th century. We read The Wasteland aloud. I was Djuna Barnes.

I teach photography and digital media to high school students. I used to be an English teacher. All of my sentence fragments are intentional. I detest talking on the phone. I enjoy drinking maker’s mark neat at the Latin American. Sometimes I have a margarita. I live in San Francisco.