Burlington City Arts has awarded Winooski artist Corrine Yonce the 2025 Diane Gabriel Visual Artist Award. The honor includes a $5,000 cash prize and $1,000 in credit towards classes at BCA studios.
Yonce, 34, works in multiple media, including drawing, painting and installation. In addition, she has been an active housing advocate and works in community support with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.
Her project “Voices of Home,” launched in 2015 and produced by the Vermont Folklife Center, is currently on view at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. The project brings together documentary-style audio stories from friends and neighbors living in affordable housing communities with painted portraits of the interviewees.
Yonce, who has a studio in Burlington’s South End, has also shown her work locally at SoapBox Arts in Burlington and, in March, as part of “Mortal Coil” at K. Grant Fine Art in Vergennes. Her paintings, some of which incorporate mixed media — metal grates, pillow stuffing, resin, cardboard, discarded objects — are expressive, colorful and juicy.
Last summer, Yonce and Jericho artist Mary Lacy completed a mosaic mural at Pliny Park in Brattleboro. They invited community members to bring broken objects that held meaning for them to “smash parties,” and then incorporated the shards into the mural. It was a monumental task, supported by a state grant that matched funds raised by the community and Brattleboro arts organization Epsilon Spires.
Two years ago, Yonce installed sculptural paintings in the King Street Laundry as part of a revitalization effort for the space; she also connected the business and its patrons with services as part of her role at CVOEO. That kind of integrated thinking seems par for the course for Yonce.
An Abandoned Burlington Laundromat Rumbles Back to Life by Embracing Its Neighborhood
An Abandoned Burlington Laundromat Rumbles Back to Life by Embracing Its Neighborhood
By Derek Brouwer
Business
The artist has thought a lot about what the idea of “home” means, in all of her work, but she values the flexibility and fluidity of expression that her visual work makes possible. “One of the really beautiful things about painting is that it’s nuanced,” she said in a phone call. “Things don’t get boxed in as quickly.”
Yonce said the award comes at a critical time for her practice, in advance of a solo show at AVA Gallery & Art Center in Lebanon, N.H., that opens in August. The funds will help her complete and frame work for the upcoming exhibition.
Yonce expressed deep gratitude to BCA, and said she is honored to receive the award. It comes about a decade after her first studio visit with BCA curator Heather Ferrell and a community arts grant from the organization, she said: “It’s been a big journey since then.”