Name: Lily Yeh: How Creativity Transforms Brokenness Into Beauty
Start: 2025-01-11T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-01-11T20:00:00-05:00
Location: OLLI at UNC Asheville

Exploring creative placemaking to deepen our understanding of Asheville and eachother post-Helene.
About this Event

Lily Yeh: How Creativity Transforms Brokenness Into Beauty

Join us for an inspiring evening with Lily Yeh, an artist whose work has taken her to communities throughout the world. 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 2003, Lily Yeh founded the non-profit organization Barefoot Artists Inc. Using the same concept and model used in Philadelphia, the Barefoot Artists work to train and empower local residents, organize communities, and take action to use the power of art to transform communities. Recently, Yeh has worked on projects in ten countries including Rwanda, Kenya, Ecuador, and China.

Placemaking can play such a role in hard-hit neighborhoods, by putting the emphasis on improving the place itself rather than viewing it as a morass of dysfunctions, each of which is narrowly addressed in terms of specific issues or professional fields. Utilizing the principles of Placemaking, Yeh has launched far-reaching projects that evoke a new sense of possibility and purpose in neighborhoods worldwide.

This presentation on Saturday will be followed by a workshop on Sunday, for which you can register separately. Lily's talk will be followed by Q&A and chance to connect with other attendees.