Sharing the Future: Philadelphia: The Village of Arts and Humanities

(This story appeared in High Performance #68, Winter 1994.)

Sharing the Future: Intro | San Antonio | Boston | Philadelphia

Village founders Lily Yeh and Joseph Williams. Yeh was the lead artist and executive director, Williams was the first neighborhood adult to join her program.

I've known this stretch of Alder Street in North Philadelphia for many years, here where it branches off of Germantown Avenue with a little dogleg that wraps around the original building of the Village of Arts and Humanities. This is now the Education Building, which will be filled with neighborhood kids taking Ione Nash's African dance class this afternoon; the building adorned with a three-story mural inspired by Egyptian and even more ancient African art; the building that faces the first community sculpture garden, from which many others have come. Alder Street today functions much as it has for years. It is a busy walkway, too narrow for cars, host to all-day chess games, jazz pumped out of Saladin Williams' window (where he's hung an oversized portrait of Elijah Mohammad), and a crew of local guys putting up a cinder-block front on a house that Lily Yeh tells me will soon be home to a crafts industry.

That crew, those plans, that's the difference, and that's what sets the Village of Arts and Humanities apart from most community arts programs. The people living on Alder and the immediate streets nearby are, for the most part, the same ones who've been here for decades. They are creative, community-minded people held back by the urban dogs of substandard housing, drug use, lack of vocational training and political disenfranchisement. Yet they are changing their lives by working with a group of artists whose vision extends beyond the artwork, and even beyond the artistic process, to encompass the complex fabric of community. Folks need to express themselves, but that alone is not enough. The brilliance of the Village of the Arts and Humanities is its ability and willingness to seek the resources to provide jobs, to teach and counsel, to provide housing and good food, and, in doing so, to connect people one to another.

Yeh is recognized as the catalyst of this change, even though she is from outside this neighborhood. She began the first Village sculpture garden in the mid '80s with little more than an intuition that the knot of men hanging out in that vacant lot would accept her, let alone come to help her. But they did, and art — the construction of tiled sculpture, parks, murals and culturally specific architectural design — has since served as entry point for scores of local residents to join in the process of community revitalization.

Art also helps germinate the seeds of leadership. While Yeh has brought in a small administrative and artistic staff, she has also encouraged residents to assume ownership of Village projects. Arts education and after-school programs have led to GED and vocational training programs, often led by neighborhood residents. The six-man crew working on the crafts building has been trained and is led by a resident of Alder Street with construction experience. As individuals gain skills, they assume responsibility for various Village projects, often moving into paying positions. Yet a community is not defined by its agreement, but by its ability to accommodate difference, and to overcome internal difficulties. For instance, Yeh speaks of a certain tolerance for substance abuse on the construction crew, but also describes a probationary process, and the creation of a Narcotics Anonymous group at the Village.

Art at the Village also leads emblematically. As it has tried to address the food, housing, and even social needs described by its residents, the project has necessarily expanded geographically. Yeh has located services and accessed utilities for squatters in the area. She has acquired title to abandoned houses for renovation, and vacant lots for community gardens and more beautiful, tiled parks. As a result, the Village enjoys a substantial amount of locally controlled public space, something rare in a city of private and police-patrolled malls and parks. These pocket parks are also strategic; they are cast out to the geographic and psychic peripheries of the Village, an artistic signal to the neighbors that its borders are expanding. Yeh says, "Living art includes ritual. This is missing in modern life. Art draws people in, then they become involved to better their lives and the community."

Certainly, the resources which a Lily Yeh or Philadelphia's entire arts community can bring to a blighted neighborhood are considerable, yet they, too, are limited. One resident told me of her frustration with the streets department in getting a fallen tree removed from her back yard. Once she spoke to Yeh, however, a crew arrived the next day. They were, however, from the Fairmount Park Art Commission, and could do nothing, since their jurisdiction was limited to street trees. In a larger sense, the Village, like other nonprofit arts organizations, remains constrained by its limited resources and fiscal structure. It relied on contributed income from foundations and other funding agencies for 100% of its 1994 budget of $300,000.

Yeh recognizes these limitations, and wants to transcend them. The crafts industry, which will emphasize images identified with the Village, is an economic-development initiative that will be organized by neighborhood residents and marketed through catalog sales. The Crafts Building will also house a food program, offering nutritional instruction and selling healthy baked goods and vegetables. As for physical development, Yeh reports that the Village is able to renovate houses for an average cost of $40,000 per unit — a respectably low rate compared with developers throughout the city. She has begun talking with a nearby community development corporation, Manos Unidos/United Hands Community Land Trust, about collaborating on the renovation of six rowhouses. The Village housing crew will share the work with Manos Unidos, and they and other residents will live in the houses. The land, according to the charter of the Land Trust, will be collectively owned to discourage speculation.

Privately, Lily Yeh has told me a number of times that her role is that of visionary. She synthesizes the expressed needs of Village residents into realistic, artistic projects, finding resources and helping develop ideas into functioning programs, and then moving on. "You must listen to people," she says, "then deliver. You must deliver. The Village creates structures and projects through which all participants come in closer contact with each other and with their own inner light. The Village is about passing the light on to others."

Sharing the Future: Intro | San Antonio | Boston | Philadelphia

Gil Ott is the author of ten books of poetry, and is editor and publisher of Singing Horse Press in Philadelphia.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #68, Winter 1994

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999