Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms

Awakening Creativity shows in gloriously illustrated detail how Lily Yeh guides a participatory process of artistic expression that uplifts a distressed community. Her open, joyful approach to artmaking is a model for building healthy cultural esteem.

Lily Yeh is an acclaimed visual artist who has worked with students, community leaders and teachers in Canada, China, Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Syria, Italy and in cities and neighborhoods across the United States. Yeh is considered one of America's most innovative urban designers and social pioneers. Awakening Creativity is her first, much-awaited book.

In Awakening Creativity, Yeh facilitates the art-making process for students of The Dandelion School, the only nonprofit organization in Beijing that serves the children of poor migrant workers coming from 24 provinces. Yeh worked with hundreds of students, teachers, volunteers and workers to transform the school's main campus with mural painting, mosaics, and environmental sculpture. Students were involved in every aspect of the art-making, which has become central to the school's curriculum and well-being.

Lily Yeh founded Barefoot Artists, a volunteer organization that uses the power of art to revitalize impoverished communities. Yeh is also the co-founder and former director of The Village of Arts and Humanities that has brought to life over 200 abandoned lots in the most distressed districts of North Philadelphia.

Once described as the ＂Mother Theresa of community arts,＂ Lily Yeh is a Philadelphia-based visual artist by way of China and Taiwan. She has won numerous awards, including an Arts and Healing Network Award as well as a Founder’s Award from the Fleisher Organization. She has completed residencies and given keynote speeches at universities throughout the United States.

Lily emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate school of Fine Arts. A successful painter and professor at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Lily traveled to Beijing in 1989 to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Art. There, she witnessed the tragic events of Tiananmen Square. Over the 1980s, Lily gradually realized that being an artist ＂is not just about making art . . . It is about delivering the vision one is given . . . and about doing the right thing without sparing oneself.＂ She founded The Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia and continues pursuing her vision through her new organization, Barefoot Artists, which teaches residents and artists how to replicate the Village model in devastated communities around the world.

Lily is most noted for transforming an urban neighborhood in North Philadelphia into an inner-city work of art. Once an empty lot, Yeh worked with the community to create an interactive park space filled with gardens and mosaics.

Lily’s vision has rippled out far beyond North Philadelphia’s borders. She inspires and collaborates with prison inmates to create beauty and art, and does the same with thousands of adults and children who live in some of the world’s most broken communities. She has collaborated with residents of the Korogocho slum near Nairobi to enliven a barren churchyard with colorful murals and sculptures and traveled to Ghana, Ecuador, The Ivory Coast and the Republic of Georgia to work on similar projects. Her most recent endeavor is the Rwanda Healing Project, in which she worked with hundreds of children and families to transform their bleak village into a place of beauty and joy.