Going Toward the Light: Philadelphia's Village of Arts and Humanities
Originally published by the Wallace Foundation
The Village is more than the striking mosaics and glittering sculptures that commuters can glimpse as they ride the SEPTA train back to the suburbs, or that city-dwellers espy from the buses that run up Eleventh Street. What began in the late 1980s as a simple effort to paint a mural and clean up a trash-strewn lot has evolved into a program that teaches art, music and dance to young and old; converts eyesores and claptraps into new homes; grows seedlings by the thousands to help reforest Philadelphia’s parks; and brings in neighborhood men and women struggling to kick their dependency on drugs.
Lily Yeh, a Chinese-born artist and art professor, came to the neighborhood in 1986 to paint a mural of creation on the barren outside wall of a dance studio run by Arthur Hall, a choreographer and impresario who earned fame bringing African dance to American stages.
With a modest grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Yeh enlisted neighborhood children and adults to turn an adjacent, abandoned lot into a vest-pocket park with signature touches: a grove of mosaic trees; a low, scalloped brown adobe wall; and love seats that glimmer like the mirrored, sequined seats on a carousel. Her style is bright, bold and elemental, with figures that spring from Yeh’s imagination and folk art from the four corners of the globe.
Eventually, she gave up her professorship at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts to tend this cultural garden that kept growing in North Philadelphia. The neighborhood has accepted her as one of their own, and powerful allies including the mayor turn out for the Village’s colorful festivals and parades.
Word of the Village and its works has spread far beyond Germantown Avenue. The Public Broadcasting Service did an arresting hour-long documentary, “An Angel in the Village.” The Reader’s Digest and a hundred other newspapers and magazines have profiled the Village, which is growing with a staff of 16, a dozen part-timers, hundreds of volunteers and an annual budget that tops $1.3 million.