Opening & Conversations at
King Street Laundromat
What does public art have to do with the concept of “home”? Join artist & housing advocate Corrine Yonce at King Street Laundromat on Thursday, April 20th from 3-5 pm to find out!
Refreshments generously provided by CEDO.
This opening event celebrates the first site of “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing.”
“Longing Is Just a Word for Knowing,” celebrates the intimate and restful gestures we take when we are in our neighborhood spaces through a series of site-responsive, public paintings, audio interviews, and housing advocacy resources. Using images, story, and public art, the works illustrate the personal nuances in how we individually think of home, the connection between home - and all the different ways we can understand what that means - and housing security, and highlights how housing security is critical for caretaking our community infrastructure and growing towards sustainable communities.
When we talk about home, rarely do we have the opportunity to speak about it outside of the “brick and mortar” of housing. At a time when communities across the US are facing their greatest need for housing development, it is critical to think as much about community connection and environmental resilience as the physicality of development. “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing” broadens the iconography we consider with this word “home,” and uses art as a means to connect people to housing advocacy resources.
The King Street Laundry site of this project has been an exciting collaboration between artist Corrine Yonce and the new owners of this business, Andrew and Hannah Christiansen. Andrew & Hannah’s desire to counter the challenging history of the laundromat - which led to its closure in 2021, leaving community members with no public laundry- merged perfectly with this project’s mission, and Corrine’s own history of using the space as a renter. What needs are universal? Everyone does laundry, and anyone who's rented in Burlington knows that an apartment alone is hard to come by, much less one with amenities like laundry.
Together, we celebrate the way we care for and move collectively through our public spaces, finding moments of awe in the mundane.
You can read more about the project at cmyonce.com
This was made with the support from the Burlington City Arts Community Arts Grant and Elevation Fund, as well as the patronage from King Street Laundromat owners. Photographs by Patricia Tafton of Soapbox Arts.