The challenge

For decades, Philadelphia’s population declined, resulting in the abandonment of factory buildings and homes, particularly in the inner city. In one North Philadelphia neighborhood, which later came to be called The Village, the population declined 51 percent between 1970 and 1990. Of the remaining 3,813 people, over half were living at or below poverty level; 32 percent of the labor force was unemployed; and the median household income was $9,898. The damage to human beings and their community was immeasurable: houses in dangerous disrepair; inferior educational opportunities; youth violence; high levels of incarceration, homelessness, drug addiction, and prostitution.


Seeds of commitment

Lily Yeh, an artist by training, was born in China and grew up in Taiwan. In 1963, she received a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts. In the 1980s, she returned to China frequently to visit. In 1989, on a trip to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Arts in Beijing, Yeh witnessed, and was profoundly moved by, the tragic events involving the students’ movement in Tiananmen Square. She had also studied the writings of Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Inspired by their lives as well as her experiences in Beijing, Yeh decided that being an artist “is not just about making art...It is about delivering the vision one is given…and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself.”

Her work, she says, focuses on reconnecting what is broken, healing what is wounded, and making the invisible visible. “In this way my work cuts through racial, class, geographic, and ethnic separations to directly connect to the heart, mind, and emotion with people.” Yeh eventually found her opportunity to “reconnect what is broken”: While hosting visiting artists from Tianjin, China, she took them to visit Arthur Hall, a talented dancer and educator who lived in North Philadelphia. It was at that point that Hall asked her to create a park on an abandoned lot next to his building.


Accomplishments

In the beginning, Yeh obtained a small grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to support her efforts to engage the children, and later the adults, of a North Philadelphia inner-city neighborhood. Their goal: to reclaim an abandoned lot, which they turned into a summer art park in 1986. With neighborhood children and adults as assistants, Yeh cleared garbage-strewn empty lots, filled them with plants, and used interesting pieces of debris to create vibrant “art parks.”

The seeds Yeh planted grew into a tree with far-reaching branches: The Village of Arts and Humanities, a multi-faceted, community-based art organization, was established in 1989. At its heart, the Village is a cluster of parks, community gardens, educational facilities, art workshops, and offices. Today, the Village annually serves 10,000 low-income people. Yeh, members of her staff, and people in her community have used sweat-equity and leveraged community resources to refurbish abandoned homes and construct new ones. They have also created after-school programs, a youth theater, a crafts center, and 14 parks, which have rarely been vandalized.

Through her organization, Yeh partners with many public schools to provide education through the arts in the city’s classroom, and environmental and art projects in its schoolyards. Along the way, her work attracted the notice of the Philadelphia Eagles Youth Partnership Program, the philanthropic arm of Philadelphia’s professional football team. The team eventually collaborated with the Village to construct a playground for neighborhood children. In 2001, Yeh and the Village were the Gold Medal recipients of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence.

Yeh also brings art instruction to prison inmates and to thousands of children and adults abroad. In 1993 she spent three months in Kenya working with residents of the Korogocho slum, at the edge of a vast garbage dump near Nairobi. The group transformed a barren church courtyard in the heart of the slum into a place of beauty, with sculptures and colorful murals. The project’s success led to an exchange program between Korogocho and the Village, and to more collaborations with projects in Ivory Coast, Ghana, the Republic of Georgia, and Ecuador. The Village continues to expand its work globally.


Her Leadership style

Yeh believes that leadership is an art and that art, in turn, is a form of leadership. Her style, she says, is inclusive, participatory, and collaborative. “When I stepped into this project, I was lacking in every way,” she recalls. “Yet this weakness became my most powerful tool in realizing the project.” In fact, her weakness was the thing that made her realize she needed help. She says that help arrived in the form of people joining the project, which in turn let Yeh realize her goals. The participatory process that unfolded provided her with a way to repair the community’s frayed social fabric and help its citizens reconnect. This is what Yeh means when she calls art a form of leadership.

She brings to her own leadership an aesthetic approach, whose themes are fostering joy and healing, and creating beauty and identity through community work. Among artists, she has encouraged a different attitude about community leadership and involvement. Philip Horn, executive director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, comments, “Artists by training are inclined to be experimenters, they are curious about ‘what will happen if I do this?’ But they often don’t transfer imagination and creativity outside their discipline. [Yeh] has moved beyond arts and a limited vision into other areas—housing, redevelopment, and a tree nursery.”


The future

Yeh hopes to pass on her personal and artistic process for community building so that The Village can continue its mission and vision without depending on her. She also plans to establish The Village of Arts and Humanities as a broader learning center for community revitalization. Her strategy will be to train outside artists, educators, planners, and neighborhood activists who want to take this work home to their own communities. The center Yeh envisions would serve as the springboard for a new project, Artists Without Borders, through which residents and artists would replicate The Village model in disenfranchised communities worldwide.


More about Lily W. Yeh and the Village of Arts and Humanities

“It has given me a great sense of pride to read in the newspapers and see on television people talking about my community in relation to beauty and hope rather than drugs and death.”
— James “Big Man” Maxton, Director of Operations, The Village for the Arts and Humanities and a neighborhood resident whose life was transformed by his involvement with the organization

“She is willing to fight anyone for this neighborhood. She believes in me, and I believe in her.”
— John Ballard, a former street vendor, who today is president of the Germantown & Lehigh Merchants Association and a store owner, working with The Village to strengthen the local commercial corridor

“It would not be an overstatement to say the opportunities she provides save lives.”
— Philip Horn, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts