Visiting Artist Lecture: Lily Yeh

Internationally celebrated artist Lily Yeh believes in the healing power of the arts to shift our way of seeing ourselves and our lives.

Along with her collaborators, she transforms physical spaces that have experienced poverty and trauma to reflect the hopes and dreams of their neighborhood residents through beautiful mosaics, murals, sculptures, and landscaping. As founder and executive director of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia from 1986 to 2004, she helped create a national model in creative place-making and community building through the arts. In 2002, Yeh pursued her work internationally, founding Barefoot Artists, Inc., to bring the transformative power of art to impoverished communities around the globe through participatory, multifaceted projects that foster community empowerment, improve the physical environment, promote economic development and preserve indigenous art and culture.

In addition to within the United States, she has also carried out projects in countries including Kenya, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Rwanda, China, Taiwan, Ecuador, Syria, Republic of Georgia, Haiti, and Palestine. See more at barefootartists.org.

Lily Yeh’s talk is part of the Next Generation of Parks Lecture Series presented by the Minneapolis Parks Foundation in partnership with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the University of Minnesota Department of Landscape Architecture, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.