A little background:   Jana Napoli

A mixed-media artist and entrepreneur committed to civic and community engagement, Jana Napoli has been reading palms for 50 years, as an avocation. She is a lifelong resident of New Orleans, a fabled and troubled city that has inspired some of her best- known work. In 1988 she founded YA/YA Inc., the internationally acclaimed non-profit youth arts organization that supports professional lives around creative expression. During her 12 years as director, Jana was honored with Oprah Winfrey’s “Use Your Life Award” and by the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities, among many citations. After Hurricane Katrina, she created Floodwall, a massive installation piece dedicated to memory and loss. Floodwall, which was exhibited at Ground Zero in New York and at venues throughout USA and Europe, embodies Jana’s fascination with the unspoken and the unseen, as does palmistry, Napoli’s avocation for decades. Deeply knowledgable about this practice and its uncanny power to lay bare the deeper patterns of individual lives, Napoli also finds in palm reading a wonderful way to open channels of communication and build trust with strangers.

The project:

On her first trip to Iceland Jana realized there are more left-hand dominant people in this country as any other county she’s been.   This caught her attention and has to lead her to the current project "Hands of Iceland."  Jana's goal is to travel around the Nation -with the help of local student interns as her interpreters - reading palms and defining the distinct characteristics of Icelandic people though their hands.  With the information gathered, the team hopes to build an art installation in each region from the visual data map of the cultural identifiers.  The culmination will be photo essays and interview transcriptions complemented by Jana's palm interpretations - presented as a web-based project.  This unique perspective of community creates a universal context for the audience to interact with the work in a platform that breaks through the economic, physical, and cultural barriers that often separate us.


 
Funding:

Jana is asking for help funding stipends for 10 Icelandic student interns who will serve as translators and cultural interpreters during the research phase: October 2019-October 2020.  Each student would receive a stipend of $400.  The hope is that these students will gain new tools to help define themselves and their country.

If we are lucky enough to go beyond our ask, we would be honored to be able to engage more Icelandic youth in assisting us with this project.