Creating Home with Artist Corrine Yonce

Corrine Yonce, artist and housing advocate, often produces work at the intersection of these roles, merging two of her passions together and creating stunning, multimedia pieces as a result.

The edges of Yonce's work often break, bend, and expand into shapes far beyond the norm, just as Yonce's framing of "home" challenges the boundaries that often define the concept. Her work can be found on herwebsite, in public spaces throughout Vermont, and as part of special exhibits, most recently the New Art Dealers Alliance curated exhibitionAssembly.

Yonce completed her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Arts as a Leslie King Hammond fellow and Alfred T Granger scholar, and she completed her Interdisciplinary Master of Education at the University of Vermont.

She received a FY2024 Creation Grantfrom the Vermont Arts Council to support her project "Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing." Most of Corrine's public work falls under this title, which encompasses a variety of projects done in collaboration and conversation with local communities. I sat down with Yonce to learn about her body of work and the creative processes behind it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Zara Johnson (ZJ): Your body of work "Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing" deals with the complexities around what is defined as "home" and has taken form in a variety of projects. Can you tell me a little bit about its beginning?

Corrine Yonce (CY):It started out as being a smaller scale project. I was making pieces in public spaces and hosting informal conversations about the connections between my work as a public artist and my work as a housing advocate. It synergized around a partnership I did with the King Street Laundromat in Burlington.

This is all happening at a time when we have a really intense housing shortage, which has been true since I started my advocacy work in 2015. And it's only become more extreme.

Renters have an extremely competitive selection process for housing. Certain folks without strong rental history, or people to co-sign for them, or good credit often can't access adequate housing. Often, people settle for housing opportunities that might not fully fit their needs.

This seems kind of abstract, but it all connects back to when the laundromat reached out to me to do a project there. The previous owner was an out-of-state landlord, and the doors were locking at a certain time. Community members were coming in before the doors locked and using the space as a shelter and a space to use. And it started to not feel safe to the broader community.

The irony was that I used to be a resident on King Street, living as an illegal sublet, and we would walk our laundry down to the King Street Laundromat. So I had a relationship with it. In that area of Burlington, it was the only laundromat that people could walk to.

It became really clear that there's something interesting happening in a space that's a really important resource of people's day-to-day lives. With the new owners, we were thinking about how to make it comfortable and accessible to people. I wanted to use our partnership as a way to highlight the intimacy that happens in that space. That's where this whole project launched from.

"Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing," Installation: Gains & Losses, Open's Glow; 2022; Acrylic, laser print on paper, caulk on insulation board & panel, resin, adidas flipflop; 72 in x 48 in x 2.5 in

ZJ: What are the most recent projects you've created?

CY:I worked with a couple of media makers at Junction Arts & Media in White River Junction who I had partnered with around housing projects. There were also tenant organizers, and we put together a multimedia project highlighting the visual vocabulary of the downtown White River Junction area.

Simultaneously, I was starting conversations with the students from Burlington City & Lake, which is a semester program at Burlington High School. Some students we're working with might be renters and people that really utilize community rooms or laundromats. Some students have the privilege of home ownership.

So we're really digging deep into those conversations, while they're meeting with the Parks Department and hearing from people that work with people experiencing homelessness, and housing providers. So it's this big,zoomed-out conversation.

And then we all zoomed back in and started asking, what does home look like in public space? What is a place that feels specific and unique to you that might not be inside of your home?

ZJ: Can you tell me about the materiality of the pieces made with the students?

CY:With the students, we made, let's see, five pieces. They're a little bit exquisite corpse-style sculptural paintings. And then I made pieces responding to those pieces.

I realized that this group was a high energy group. They really needed their hands to be on materials. And keep in mind that this group wasn't an art high school class, this was a group of students that were learning about different sectors in our community. I was coming in as a resident artist and to help them synthesize these ideas into a material outcome. That's where I was like, "These students need some duct tape, cardboard, and plaster." And that's the route we went.

There's one piece I made using plaster and cardboard, responding to a drawing I did of two people sharing space in the community. These are really accessible materials. Plaster is something that you can buy quite cheaply at a hardware store. Obviously, cardboard wasn't something I even needed to purchase.

I had a vision of the thing, what it was going to look like, what the conversations were going to be like, what the framing was. And the project ended up super different than what I envisioned.

& We Gave Them Tents;
Acrylic, inkjet print on discarded ladder toss, insulation board and plaster; 40in x 24 in x 24 in; 2023

ZJ: What does your creative process look like and how has the Vermont Arts Council's Creation Grant helped support it?

CY: The thing that the Creation Grant has really allowed me to do is behind-the-scenes conversations. I'm allowed to synthesize all these drawings, color palettes, objects, conversations, and moments of community engagement, and start to experiment with materials to be able to introduce them back into the community.

And the second piece that goes into this is the education piece. It takes a lot of really clear and specific dialogue so people can see how caring for underutilized public spaces connects to a sense of belonging and welcoming. You need dialogue about how housing security plays into the bigger picture of safe and thriving communities.

ZJ: Looking to the future, do you think your work as a housing advocate and your work as a public artist will continue to be intertwined?

CY: In terms of how we mobilize as a community, for some reason, the housing space hasn't offered as much invitation. There's not enough fishing lines out there for everyday community members to plug in, especially for the younger advocate community.

When I first started housing advocacy, I was very often the only woman in the room, the youngest person in the room by multiple decades. It's something I really want to help demystify for people,and I want to keep making resources so people feel like they can advocate for housing in their community.

Public art feels like a form of community care, and it also feels like an option to talk about who the community is for and how we ensure that the community stays there for all the people that utilize these spaces.

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