Lily Yeh, founder and executive director of The Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, was born in Guiyang, China, in 1941. She grew up in Taiwan and emigrated to the United States at age 22 to pursue a master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at the University of the Arts and enjoyed success as a painter, but eventually directed her energy toward North Philadelphia's Fairhill neighborhood toward creating the Village and its panoply of mosaics, vest-pocket parks and rehabilitation projects in Philadelphia's forlorn Fairhill neighborhood. The Village flourished and soon attracted a steady stream of visitors - artists and community developers - interested in how art can help transform poor communities. Yeh herself has applied her methods in other places, including a shantytown built next to a garbage dump outside Nairobi, Kenya. In 1999 she spoke at one of Al and Tipper Gore's Family Reunions in Nashville, where the then-vice president had summoned experts and activists to compare notes on community building. Her son, Daniel Yeh Traub, 30, is a filmmaker in Beijing. Yeh credits her late father, Pei Kao Yeh, a general in Chiang Kai-Shek's army, with instilling the love of Chinese landscape painting that set her on the artist's path. Steeped in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, she is spiritual, pragmatic and organized - a powerful combination for someone engaged in community building work.
Executive Director Lily Yeh
Photograph by Christopher Connell
I've been painting for decades. I started when I was 15. I always called myself a painter then, never an artist. I painted in the studio. I showed in the galleries. I had a nice teaching job at University of the Arts, but I was still searching for my identity. Who am I? What am I doing? I didn't feel this deep sense of rootedness. In 1986, I stepped into my path, which is the life of an artist. Art is not what I do, but it is what I am. To be an artist is a total commitment. What you call entrepreneur I call the life of an artist.
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People ask how do I get children to come? It's so easy. I just have a canvass or plain cloth, but that's my magic carpet. I wrap all the magic colors in them - yellow, blue, red, green -- they are magic. The children get excited. You don't need to call them. When you have something so seductive as colors, you draw more kids than you can handle.
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I never dreamed that I could change things. Even now, it's not on my agenda to make people's lives better, to revolutionize the system. I don't see myself as a social activist. I am an artist. What I am about is sharing that sense of joy when I am creating with many people, with whoever wants to be a part of that process. It's not that I came to make their life better. People say, "You improve so many people. You make people happy." I say, "No, people make me happy." I need other people.
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Around us there is all this unspeakable tragedy that everybody hides: Prison. Murder. Drugs. Abandonment. Men drifting away. All the things that society says are shameful. If people hold these in themselves, eventually they destroy a person. In life, there is the bright and the darkness. Our society hides the darkness. I say, no, let's understand what that is. So our joy is rooted in the depth of our tragedy and challenge and difficulty.
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The reason the Village happens is because it is in the inner city where things are broken down, where the law doesn't choke everything. We are out in the wilderness, where things are kind of quirky, where it's possible for wildflowers to break through.
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We are all dysfunctional; we are all separated from the whole. We are not more dysfunctional in the inner city. We are just more exposed. We can't even get through the day, with basic needs and so forth. But somehow, together, we make it whole. You see the mosaics? It's perfect: taking broken pieces, recreating and making something beautiful.
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Art in our society is either put on a pedestal or it's on the fringe of things. If you say you're an artist, people think you're a little loony. You do strange things. You make people uncomfortable. Or you make things to be bought.
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The real impact of the Village is on all the individuals we come in contact with, particularly our children. They talk differently. They act differently. Because they went through an environment where they really mattered, they look at the future and they dream.