We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joanne Steinhardt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joanne below.
Joanne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
My current body of work, Endless Second Chances, is by far the most meaningful project I have ever worked on both professionally and personally.
My mother died in 2012. In the moments after she transitioned, I walked through her kitchen, and something compelled me to grab an old crate filled with all of her recipes. For the next seven years I created 12 hand bound sculptural yet functional books from the artifacts and recipes of my mother. I launched the community-based project in 2019 to humbling success. At the end of my time traveling in California with the books, my car was broken into and their case and all of the volumes were stolen never to be retrieved. Over the following weeks I unwound all the participants and contracts from the previous month and stopped. I stopped almost everything at that point.
In 2021 I cleaned out my old studio space and found some scraps of the materials from the books. I quietly and slowly created miniature replicas of each of them, placing them inside a replica of my mother’s kitchen that was built into an antique valise. They felt memorialized, close, and safe. I have never shown this piece. It is mine. But in that making I started to think about objects and how they affect people emotionally. Humans attach deep meaning to objects saving things long past their intended usefulness. So, I built a replica of my mother’s gardens in one of her cast iron pans I had kept. Then an edible garden in a small brass pan. Next was a painting studio in my grandfather’s custom-made top hat. While digging through closets I found tattered kitchen rags and dish towels that had been saved well past their use. I found beauty in their rips and scars of hard work. These too needed a new life beyond their initial purpose. Simple single line embroidery adorns each of them both holding them together and elevating them. Simultaneously I was building tiny environments in measuring spoons, grilled cheese pans, a toilet and the remnant textiles were being sewn. In my search for materials, I started using bed linens such as bedspreads and sheets. Pillowcases were transformed into tunics of all sizes. All repurposed, each with their story of being overlooked and discarded; then offered a rebirth, a redemption, a new life – a second chance.
My story is not a unique story. Loss, object attachment, grief, picking oneself up, taking a good long hard at oneself, and moving forward is a tale we all know. The body of work, Endless Second Changes, has offered a platform for others to tell their stories and, in that, maybe take the hard but important steps of personal healing.
This body of work is by far the most important work I have done both for myself and for those that interact with the work.
Joanne, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I have had a varied career path that has always utilized by creative skills. I have worked in both public and private sector hospitals in medical media services and education, as a creative specializing in new business pitch production and campaign configuration for advertising, achieved tenure at the university level, owned my own data and consulting business, and above all else, I am a mother.
I took the chance to stand up my studio and be a full time studio artist about 10 years ago. Under the umbrella of the studio, I not only create art, I also offer commissioned works, offer one-time standalone lectures, and multi day masterclasses. The topics range from my personal journey, to bookbinding, using found objects to process trauma, the art markets, and guided tours of the large Art Fairs. More than anything, I enjoy connecting with people and and enthusiastic about helping others on their unique pathways.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
For me the most rewarding part of creating work is seeing it in public and connecting people to each other and to themselves in a meaningful way that perhaps they would not have done any other way. For example, my canes, I Can Walk with Your Help, embody the frustration of impaired mobility. Every time these are displayed viewers tell me stories of their loved ones who struggle with mobility and many times their own emotions around that issue. The work acts as a conduit to explore conversations that are otherwise shunned or pushed aside. Total strangers openly tell me their intimate emotional journeys, and for that I am deeply humbled and grateful that I can do something that helps another. This is by far the most rewarding thing about the work that I do. The discussions driven by a piece of artwork or someone who learns through a workshop about their own pathway, to running a professional studio, for me, it is supporting others and creating community that is most rewarding.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
For me, one of the major things many non-creatives struggle with is that being a creative and running a studio is a business. Artists need to know marketing, accounting, sales, HR, finance, be a strong writer, do research, budgeting, and be the face of the product – if not the product itself. Understanding the complexities of the art market is just as important for a creative as it is for and investment banker to understand the stock markets. There are many days when “creating” is not part of my job at all. This is why one of the offerings from my studio are workshops and master classes in understanding the art markets and how to use resources to fulfill that are less intuitive to the studio owner. I am passionate about education and building support systems for individuals to thrive within. It has been a theme of my career within the arts, education, and business.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.JoanneSteinhardt.com
- Instagram: @JoanneSteinhardt
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joanne.steinhardt
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanne-steinhardt/
Image Credits
Heidi Hapanowicz (headshot)