Page 119 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Beauty from Brokenness: Caroline Casey interviews Lily Yeh*

Caroline:

Lily Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist whose work has taken

her to communities throughout the world as Founder and Executive

Director of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia

from 1968 to 2004. She helped create a national model of community

building through the arts. In 2002, Yeh founded Barefoot Artists

Incorporated to bring the transformative power of arts to impoverished

communities around the globe through participatory multifaceted

projects that foster community wealth, improve the physical
Lily Yeh

environment, promote economic development and preserve indigenous art and culture.

In addition to the United States, she's carried on her projects in multiple countries -- Kenya, Haiti,

Philadelphia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Rwanda, China, Taiwan, Ecuador, Syria, Republic of Georgia, Haiti

and just returning now from Palestine. Welcome, Lily.

Lily:

So happy to be here.

Caroline:

It's such a powerful historic time and I so admire your work. We know dedicated acts of beauty trump

tyranny. When you were working at the Beijing School, some young woman, as I remember it, said,

"Since Lily guided me to my own creativity, I am no longer willing to accept the fate that was assigned

me."

Lily:

Yes. I think the participatory creative process everywhere, in community or in schools, is very, very

empowering for young people, for people in disenfranchised communities. They don't have the voice.

They can’t express themselves. And so often they feel that they have no power. But in the art, it's a

direct participation. And if we encourage everybody to imagine and to express their voices and not be

afraid, that is a very effective way to empower people.

Caroline:

So Venus truly is an agent of a trickster redeemer within us all. If we animate our own creativity, we

have more freedom. Just as this young woman expressed.

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