Lynn Yarne

USA, b. 1983, Portland, OR, lives and works in Portland, OR

Lynn Yarne: Photos of Your Auntie Smiling as a Monument

About the Project

Lynn Yarne is a Portland-based artist and educator who uses animation and collage to explore neighborhood memory and public pedagogy. Her C45 project, Photos of Your Auntie Smiling as a Monument, features an installation and social dance workshops in Chinatown’s vacated Fong Chong restaurant [TBC] that aim to pass down cultural traditions through joy rather than trauma. Working with elders, she invites audiences to learn Japanese Obon and soul line dancing. Accompanied by archival photos of historic joy, Yarne’s work complicates local narratives and brings new audiences to a neighborhood that deeply shaped Portland’s immigrant communities.

Artist Bio

A fourth- and fifth-generation Japanese and Chinese American from Portland, Yarne’s personal heritage heavily guides her creative focus on the relationships between community, space, and story. Her visual art practice embraces mythology, messiness, and autoethnography, using visual remixing as a process of meaning-making. She pulls from mixed metaphors, iconography, "stories your auntie’s friend told you," and inherited traditions to build site-based collaborations.

Alongside her studio practice, Yarne is a full-time classroom teacher in a public high school. Driven by an interest in public pedagogy, she co-created a screenprinting program with local teens that began in the closet of a science lab and now trains over 200 young people a year, equipping them with the skills to participate in visual culture and create positive change. As an artist whose medium is people, she approaches community engagement as a constant study of curiosity, care, and intention—with a deep appreciation for communal kitchens and everyday magic.