Beauty in Broken Places: Lily Yeh’s Healing Art

Piece Description

In worlds of shattered dreams and broken hearts, Lily Yeh finds artful ways to mend, heal and renew. Born in mainland China and raised on Taiwan as the daughter of a famous general and war hero, she immigrated to the U.S., attended art school in Philadelphia, and became an accomplished classical Chinese painter. But it was not until she took her students to visit a well-known local dancer whose studio was located in a burned-out North Philly neighborhood that Lily found her true calling. Asked what she could do to make something of the abandoned lot next door, she faced her initial fear of entering this no-go zone, began picking up shards of broken glass, and soon enlisted puzzled neighbors to help. From the shattered glass they made mosaic, from the ashes a garden..and then another...and another. Two decades later, the Village of Arts and Humanities occupies 120 square blocks of North Philadelphia. Lily has since taken her same disarmingly innocent approach to genocide victims in Rwanda and landfill residents in Kenya. In an intimate conversation, Lily Yeh describes how she finds and creates beauty in broken places and in turn how she has helped others discover their own. 

Guest: 

Lily Yeh, founder, Barefoot Artists;  co-founder, The Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia