Writer, Artist and Critic
Painted Bride Art Center, University of the Arts, and Village of Arts and Humanities, Philadelphia
Yeh left a relatively successful career as a painter to work on the Village. Virtually all her artistic work since then, beginning with the large mural backing the first park, has been collaborative, involving neighborhood residents, invited artists such as Bob Craddock and Alejandro Lopez, and longterm partnerships with playwright H. German Wilson and choreographer Ione Nash. Other Village initiatives, such as writing, art and dance classes, have taken on independent life as the Village has become institutionalized.
Two of the Kujenga Pumoja events reflected Yeh's sharpening understanding of ritual as an artistic medium uniquely suited to community building. In one, a procession of costumed children, led by drummer John Omondi (an exchange artist from Kenya), culminated outside the Painted Bride Art Center. Painted Bride Director Gerry Givnish, himself dressed 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 Bride's past support of the Village. As any working ritual should, this one brought its participants--leaders, actors and observers--to an altered state, a real, present-time sense of communion.
A larger and more ambitious event at the Village offered a similarly heightened experience for its participants. It included a procession around the neighborhood, with blessings and fruit offerings at each Village park and some houses (attended by Philadelphia's ubiquitous Mayor Rendell); a coming-of-age ceremony for a group of neighborhood teens; and dance and music-theater presentations featuring the teenagers.
The Painted Bride featured the work of artists who have taught or produced artworks for the Village. Barbara Bullock's iridescent painted-paper "spirit" forms, Yeh's own 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, in addition to Village projects, a parallel community-based project Yeh has undertaken in Korogocho, a Nairobi neighborhood perched on a vast, smoking garbage dump.
So what do we have here? Is it, as some take it, a strikingly successful community art project, led by a former artist--former because she has stopped exhibiting independently? Is it a radical example of the new community-based art--radical because by her permanent commitment, Yeh has subsumed her work to it?
I would argue for the fruitfulness of considering the community-building aspects of her work as Yeh's primary art practice. Embedded as it is in the creation of collaborative events, her work is transparent, ubiquitous and essential. Suzanne Lacy, Betsy Damon and others have worked in large-scale community-based artforms. In this besieged corner of North Philadelphia, where the Village's very effectiveness tends weight perception toward its social-program aspects and away from its artistic nature, Yeh's work deserves to be considered with equal seriousness.
--Miriam Seidel