Lily Yeh at the Village of Arts and Humanities and other venues - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In 1986 Lily Yeh began working with the residents of a poor North Philadelphia neighborhood to build a community park. Her "Village of Arts and Humanities" has grown to encompass several parks, gardens, a community center performances and incidents "Kujenga Pumoja" ("together we build" in Swahili), this fall's tenth-anniversary exhibition and performance series, was a kind of retrospective for the Village and for Yeh herself, who left a career as a painter to dedicate herself to this new form of work. Her artistic endeavors since the first mural at the first park have been overwhelmingly collaborative, including work created with neighborhood residents, with invited artists of the like kind as Bob Craddock and Alejandro Lopez and with longterm partners similar as playwright H. German Wilson and choreographer lonely Nash.

sum of two units of the "Kujenga Pumoja" circumstances reflected Yeh's sharpened understanding of ritual as an artistic medium suited to community building. In single of them, a procession of costum children l by the agency of Kenyan drummer John Omondi arrived outside the Painted Bride Art Center Painted Bride director Gerry Givnish, make straighted in a flowing bridal gown accepted gifts of fruit, dances, blessing chants and a banner, which the dancers wrapped around him like a cloak, all in tribute to the Center's support of the Village. As any working ritual should, this individual brought its participants to an altered state, a real faculty of perception of communion. A larger, culminating incident at the Village mixed traditional stage presentation of dance and music-theater works with more frankly ceremonial uncompounded bodys A circuitous procession which stopped to tender blessings and gifts at houses and Village parks, and a coming-of-age ritual for neighborhood teen showed the expansion to which Yeh's aspirations have evolv toward culture-making.

sum of two units exhibitions at the Painted Bride featured the work of artists who have taught or produc art works for the Village. Barbara Bullock's iridescent painted-paper "spirit" forms, Yeh's hold small, surreal gouaches (from 1987) and John Stone's precise and poignant assemblages were among the notable works. At the University of the Arts, a largely photographic exhibition documented Village throws and a parallel project Yeh has undertaken in Korogocho, a Nairobi community perched upon a vast, smoking garbage dump

in the way that what do we have here? Is this, as a certain number of say, a successful community-art shoot forward led by a former artist-former because she has stopped exhibiting independently? Or is it a radical example of the fresh community-based art-radical because of Yeh's permanent commitment and her art's fresh form? I would argue for the fruitfulness of considering community-building as Yeh's primary art practice. Her work, embedded as it is in the creation of collaborative incidents is transparent, ubiquitous and essential. Suzanne Lacy, Betsy Damon and others have worked in large-scale community-based art forms. granting the Village's very effectiveness in this besieged corner of North Philadelphia draws attention to its social-program aspects and away from its artistic nature, Yeh's work can be considered with equal seriousness. Her materials accrue upon a macro scale, and her touch is everywhere in evidence.

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