{"id":1020710,"date":"2026-08-24T09:56:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1020710\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T09:56:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:56:18","slug":"philadelphias-lily-yeh-to-receive-peace-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1020710\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia\u2019s Lily Yeh to receive peace award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeh\u2019s global work started in Philly<\/p>\n

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.
\n\"AA portrait of the artist, Lily Yeh, taken in 2007. (Daniel Traub)\n<\/p>\n

\u201cMy inner voice said, \u2018If you don\u2019t rise to the occasion, the best of you will die and the rest will not amount to anything,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI overcame my fear and I stepped in. Then a totally different world opened.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Yeh left UArts and grew the Village into a community arts organization that still operates today<\/a>. She stepped down in 2004 to focus her attention on international projects through her organization Barefoot Artists<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Yeh leads community-based art projects places she describes as \u201cbroken,\u201d such as the Dandelion School of Migrant Children<\/a> in Beijing, China, supporting impoverished families of migrant workers; the Korogocho slums<\/a> of Nairobi, Kenya; and the site of a mass grave of Tutsis<\/a> killed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.\n <\/p>\n

\"LilyIn 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)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just go in and we listen,\u201d Yeh said. \u201cWe find the hidden resources and we awaken the creativity in other people. You elevate people.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Youth Peace Ambassadors<\/a> program.\n<\/p>\n

Yeh said receiving the award is a testament to the power of art.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cArt is not a noun. It\u2019s a verb. It\u2019s action,\u201d she said. \u201cThrough 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\u2019s what art is.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yeh\u2019s global work started in Philly Yeh started the Village of Arts and Humanities in 1986, making outdoor…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1020711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,23781,12631,1448,2830,1311,10855,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1020710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-america","tag-award","tag-north-philadelphia","tag-pa","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-tokyo","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117149894172973811","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1020710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1020711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1020710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1020710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1020710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}