Joanne Grüne-Yanoff is a Swedish-American artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. In her practice she examines the individual’s charged relationship with the outside world through a character she has developed, Cassandra, who stands on the ground, looking up at the sky, thinking about flight.
This exploration threads visually through her work and connects with workshops she runs with marginalized populations around the world to help build tools for finding home and community.
In 2018, through the Rutgers University grant “Racial Healing in an Urban Context” Grüne-Yanoff joined Newark Public Libraries and Jamie Lew, Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Global Urban Studies, PhD program in Urban Systems, to create a series of Newark-based workshops to be part of this ongoing project. Grüne-Yanoff led workshops throughout the city.
Grüne-Yanoff and Lew partnered with community-based and public education programs in Newark, by offering workshops in Newark Public Libraries, Rutgers University-Newark, Ironbound, senior centers and nonprofit organizations in Newark. In each workshop, participants traced their footprints and shared stories about the their ideas of home, community and identity.
Grüne-Yanoff incorporated these stories and footprints into the creation of a safety net trampoline to hang at NPL, along with other works inspired by these exchanges.
The safety net trampoline is constructed of 322 footprints, each of which carries its own story and together symbolizes its own community. Inspirations from some of the shared stories hang in the stairwells.
