Founder and Executive Director of the Village of Arts and Humanities
email: LilyYeh@aol.com
Education:B.A., National Taiwan University, 1963
M.F.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1966
1956-63 Studied classical Chinese painting with masters in TaiwanYeh, Lily (artist)
bio
East/West
Village of Arts and Humanities
Flight of a Visionary Angel
Honors:
Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 2001
(see also below)Coming Up Taller Award (President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities), 2000
Lily Yeh has received numerous awards and Honorary Degrees including the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Arts Leadership and Service as well as the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence. She has an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA from the National University in Taipei, Taiwan and has studied classical Chinese painting with masters in Taiwan. She has taken her philosophy and methodology into other parts of the United States and impoverished communities abroad including Kenya, Ivory Coast, Ecuador, China, and Soviet Georgia. (from Headlands.org)
Lily Yeh: Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, honoris causa
University of the Arts, Philadelphia, 2000Lily Yeh was honored for her art and her social activism, for her skill in bringing beauty to the ugliest of landscapes and in the process helping to heal the surrounding community. In 1986, while still a professor at UArts, Yeh started her work in the "badlands" of North Philadelphia with a small grant to build a mural and a garden. The world-recognized Village of Arts and Humanities now encompasses several blocks and has grown to include housing, after-school programs, and other community efforts. Yeh has also brought her vision of community change through art to a blighted neighborhood in Kenya, to the Ivory Coast, to street children in the Republic of Georgia, among others, and was the subject of the video documentary "An Angel in the Village."
Lily Yeh is a small woman with a giant spirit, a person who has made a huge difference in the lives of thousands of people in Philadelphia and across the world. She lives at the place where the arts and social change meet.
Lily Yeh was born in mainland China and grew up in Taiwan, with a love of classical Chinese landscape painting fostered in her by her father. After immigrating to America at the age of 22, she earned a master's degree in the arts from the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly after, in 1968, she began teaching at The University of the Arts. Although she had success exhibiting her paintings and sculpture in galleries during the 1970s and 1980s, she felt an increasing urge to create art that reached more people, and helped transform their lives. In 1985, she visited a North Philadelphia neighborhood wounded by unemployment, high crime rates, drug use, and many other problems. There, with the help of residents, she began to transform a large area, strewn by litter, into an urban park and a new nonprofit organization, The Village of Arts and Humanities.
As the Village took more of Lily Yeh's time and energies, she had to start reducing her work as a University of the Arts professor after almost 30 years, but our community's loss was the world's gain. Today, the Village has grown to include neighborhood housing, after-school programs, and other major grassroots community efforts. It transforms the lives of all it touches: local school children, affluent volunteers from Philadelphia's suburbs, recovering drug addicts from the neighborhood, and many others, all working side-by-side. In the meantime, Lily Yeh has brought the Village model to Kenya and other locations around the world, showing the power of transformation through art. (from University of the Arts)
Lily Yeh
Doctor of Humane Letters
University of Massachusetts, Boston, 2001Like most skilled artists, Lily Yeh can transform materials, shapes, and colors into works of significance. Unlike many, she does so in ways that also transform individuals and entire communities. Classically trained in China, Yeh is a professor of art and art history at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, but is perhaps best known for this community-serving work.
In 1986, she took a small, empty lot and created a village, her “Village of the Arts and Humanities.” Now spanning a city block, it offers educational programs, theater and dance training, crafts industries, writing, publishing, photography, computer instruction programs, and construction and renovation programs, and outreach activities. Over 3,000 children, teens, and adults participate annually. In 1993, she replicated the model in an even more desolate location outside of Nairobi, Kenya.
Yeh says, “The answer is not so much that I help others. It was always I who longed to make contact with that which is essential and real for others.” She adds, “I knew that if I did not have the courage to rise to the occasion, the best of me would die and the rest of me would not amount to anything.”
from Pew Fellowship
Describing Lily Yeh as a sculptor is a bit like describing the Sahara desert as dry. While technically true, it ignores the scope of the situation. Ms. Yeh's sculpture shop is the city itself; its residents are her workshop. In her ongoing North Philadelphia-based project, The Village of Arts and Humanities, Ms. Yeh has collaborated with a sprawling community of artists and ordinary citizens to create an oasis in a heretofore ignored part of the city. Sculpture springs up in vacant lots. Murals appear on walls where adjacent buildings have disappeared. Even more convincingly than the work itself speaks about the transformation of the neighborhood, local residents show how radically things have changed by their pride and participation in the ever refining process of what Ms. Yeh refers to as "a dustless realm." Ms. Yeh received her B.A. at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, and her M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. She has also studied classical Chinese painting with masters in Taiwan. Her work with the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia has been recognized and support by grants from the Venture Fund Award from the Carnegie Mellon Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Philadelphia Foundation, and the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation. Ms. Yeh has been a visiting professor and guest artist/speaker for colleges and academies in China and currently teaches at the University of the Arts.
Professional Accomplishments
1997 Artist, Niemasso Children's Art Project, Ivory Coast
1997 Home Town Hero Award and Profile: Children's Miracle Network 1997 champions
1986-present The Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia, founder and executive director; lead artist and project director of Ile-Ife Park, Angel Alley, Meditation Park, Magical Garden, Guardian Angel Park
1996 Humanity for Gardens Award, Mesa, Ariz.
1996 Villagecrafts, concept person and project director of economic initiative to create income earning venues through arts and crafts, Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia
1996 Prudential Foundation Leadership Award: Prudential Bank, Philadelphia
1995 Human Rights Award for Arts and Culture: Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations
1995 Korogocho Project II Kenya, visiting artist and project director, Ford Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya
1995 Aching to Belong, project director, concept person, and producer, a multi-arts theater performance at the Hartanft School, Philadelphia and Laurie Wagman Hall Theater, University of the Arts, Philadelphia
1995 Joy, 8' x 17' mosaic mural, commission, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia (mosaics by James Maxton)
1995 Ione Dugger Vargus Multicultural Award: Multicultural Institute, School of Social Administration, Temple University, Philadelphia
1995 Connecting Through Walls, concept person and project director, newsletter created by artists and prison inmates to break down the walls of misperception and silence
1995 Banners for Chinatown's 125th anniversary celebration, project director, Philadelphia
1994 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship
1994 Womens Way Annual Dinner Honoree, theme: "Generations"
1994 Artist Award: International Friends of Transformative Art, Mesa, AZ
1993-94 Lila Wallace Arts International Fellowship, New York; artist, Korogocho Project I, Kenya, transforming a bleak courtyard into a jubilant garden of painted and sculpted angels and flowers
1993 ARCO Chemical Company Community Service Award, Newtown Square, Pa.
1993 Commission, 5' x 15' mosaic mural, Pennsylvania Convention Center's permanent collection, PhiladelphiaEducation
1966 University of Pennsylvania, M.F.A.
1963 National Taiwan University, B.A.
1956-63 Studied classical Chinese painting with masters in Taiwan
Lily Yeh
internationally celebrated artist and
Executive Director of the Village of Arts and HumanitiesLily Yeh was born in China and studied traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan. She came to the United States in 1963, received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1968 to 1998, she was a Professor of Painting and Art history at the University of the Arts. She is currently Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of the Village of Arts and Humanities, a non-profit organization dedicated to rebuilding community through the arts.
The Village of Arts and Humanities was a neighborhood filled with despair and urban blight. Lily Yeh in collaboration with neighborhood children, adults, and artists, transformed this North Philadelphia neighborhood into a place of beauty, hope, and urban renewal. The Village has been recognized locally and nationally as a successful model for engaging residents, especially youth, in the process of rebuilding their neighborhood.
Yeh has received many awards: PA Council on the Arts Fellowship Arts, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Lila Wallace Arts International, Prudential Foundation’s 1996 Leadership Award, HomeTown Hero Award from the Children’s Miracle Network, Leeway Foundation Achievement, the Art Award for Leadership and Services from Governor Ridge of Pennsylvania and many others.
Quotations:
This is where art and society and politics and social work is all merging into one, and this is the skeleton and the backbone of everything we deliver, whether it's transforming the community physically, helping a teen to go to college, it's in everything that we do. So I always say that art is not just the project that we produce, like a mural, a park, and a performance. It's much more essential to our daily activities. And art is creativity in thinking, in methodology, in implementation. That's what we call art. ----Lily Yeh artist, founder, and Director of the Village of Arts and Humanities
Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist and the multi-award winning executive director of the Village of Arts and Humanities. She was born in China and studied traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan. She came to the United States in 1963 and received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1966, she began teaching at the University of the Arts where she became Senior Professor of Painting and Art History. Her work has been shown at various places in United States, China, and Kenya.
Over the past thirteen years, with the help of neighborhood children and adults, Yeh has built the Village from an abandoned lot into an organization and a community. She has transformed despair and urban blight into beauty, hope, and urban renewal. Guided by her vision and sensibility, most of the public art in the Village has been created through her collaboration with other artists and community residents.
Yeh's work at the Village has earned her opportunities to travel to Africa where her work has exerted significant influences on different communities both in Kenya and Ivory Coast. From 1993 to the present, Yeh has been working with people living in Korogocho, a settlement near a huge garbage dump on the outskirts of Nairobi. 100,000 residents live in this shanty town constructed of recycled trash materials. During her residency, Yeh transformed a barren and dusty church and school yard into a colorful garden of painted and sculpted angels and flowers. In addition, she helped to establish a cultural exchange program between The Village of Arts and Humanities and its sister organization in Nairobi, Paa Ya Paa Art Center and an art education program at Korogocho.
In Nov. 1997, collaborating with an anthropologist and a theater artist, Yeh traveled to Ivory Coast to work with children on mural painting and performance in Niemasso, a tiny village near Odienné. It is her intention to return with the same team to Niemasso to work with the residents on education and economic development through the arts. In 1999, Yeh will be traveling to Dzegvi village near Tbilisi in the Georgian Republic to conduct workshops for 110 street children. In June, she will be traveling to Matera, Italy to conduct workshops for children who used to live in the ancient caves Sassi).
Based on her work at the Village and in Africa, Yeh has received many prestigious awards, which include: a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1992, a Lila Wallace-Arts International Fellowship in 1993, a PA Council on the Arts Fellowship Arts and Culture in 1995, Prudential Foundation's Leadership Award in 1996, HomeTown Hero Award by Children's Miracle Network in 1997, and an ArtsLink Grant for Dzegvi Children's Project in the Georgian Republic in 1998, and an Honorary Doctor Degree from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1999 in Boston. Also in May, her work featured in "An Angel in the Village," an hour long documentary film created by award-winning video artist Glenn Holsten has been presented in public broadcasting stations in Philadelphia and other cities in the country. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, William Penn Foundation, Connelly Foundation, the Philadelphia Foundation, Fels Foundation, Butler Family Fund, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation in Kenya, and many others.
Abstract
The Village began as an art project in converting an abandoned lot into a community garden with the participation of neighborhood youth. Now the Village has become a non-profit organization which has transformed 90 trash-strewn, abandoned lots in its neighborhood into 15 art parks and gardens, including a new two acre tree farm converted from an industrial brown field. The most powerful thing is the participation of neighborhood residents, children first and then adults. We educate the children on land preservation, cleaning up and environmental issues, and our responsibility to protect the land. We do job training and community building through creating a structure through which all participants work together to improve their environment and to build community fabric and dream together. This structure is the transforming trashed filled land into vegetable gardens, flower gardens, parks, and tree farms. Through the project, we are teaching a new citizenship that involve in their neighborhood affairs, that take actions to improve their land and lives, and that people come together to provide a better environment and future for their youth.
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