Yeh’s global work started in Philly
Yeh started the Village of Arts and Humanities in 1986, making outdoor sculpture and mosaics in a vacant lot off of Germantown Avenue in North Philly. Then a tenured professor at the University of the Arts, she pulled in nearby residents to help, many of them living with addiction and without homes.
A portrait of the artist, Lily Yeh, taken in 2007. (Daniel Traub)
“My inner voice said, ‘If you don’t rise to the occasion, the best of you will die and the rest will not amount to anything,’” she said. “I overcame my fear and I stepped in. Then a totally different world opened.”
Yeh left UArts and grew the Village into a community arts organization that still operates today. She stepped down in 2004 to focus her attention on international projects through her organization Barefoot Artists.
Yeh leads community-based art projects places she describes as “broken,” such as the Dandelion School of Migrant Children in Beijing, China, supporting impoverished families of migrant workers; the Korogocho slums of Nairobi, Kenya; and the site of a mass grave of Tutsis killed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In an undated photo, Lily Yeh teaches mosaic art to Rwandans as part of the Rugerero Genocide Memorial on the location of a mass grave from the 1994 Tutsi genocide. Yeh has been involved in art projects in Rwanda since 2004. (Provided by Lily Yeh)
“We just go in and we listen,” Yeh said. “We find the hidden resources and we awaken the creativity in other people. You elevate people.”
The Goi award comes with a cash prize of 1 million yen, or just over $6,000. Yeh said she has made arrangements to distribute the money to people identified in the foundation’s Youth Peace Ambassadors program.
Yeh said receiving the award is a testament to the power of art.
“Art is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s action,” she said. “Through creating beauty you embrace everything: the pain, the suffering, the dark, the broken, the talent, the imagination. Your pain, in story, can be elevated to become theater and performance. That’s what art is.”