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Citizen artists revitalize place, celebrate culture, and inspire social change

This full-color celebration of communities engaged in creative cultural expression profiles nine exemplary grassroots arts projects depicting an intersection of creativity with love of place. Stories range from children applying an African-inspired mud facade on their Oregon middle school to an annual blessing-procession and festival in North Philadelphia that brings to life dozens of the most depressed blocks in urban America. Other regions represented include Minneapolis, Boston, Berkeley, rural Maine, San Francisco, the New York Bronx, and Vancouver, Canada. Community-based arts resources are cited throughout.

Works of Heart offers a compendium of multicultural human-interest stories that will inspire and inform both community development professionals and citizen activists. Among those profiled are Lily Yeh and the Village of Arts and Humanities, Clara Wainwright and the Faith Quilts Project, River of Words Youth Art and Poetry, and the Beehive Design Collective.

Columnist, scriptwriter, poet and freelance journalist specializing in art, architecture, sustainability, business and cultural trends. Minneapolis.

Kiko Denzer, an artist and builder, creates beautiful wood-fired ovens using the most widely available building material: dirt. He lives in the Oregon coast range, where he is a practitioner of earthen art and building, and has been building earthen ovens since 1994. He wrote Build Your Own Earth Oven, 3rd Edition: A Low-Cost Wood-Fired Mud Oven; Simple Sourdough Bread; Perfect Loaves (2007) and Dig Your Hands in the Dirt: A Manual For Making Art Out Of Earth (2005).

Alicia Hokanson is the author of Phosphorus (1984) and Mapping the Distance (1989). Both books are collections of the author's poems. Hokanson is a writing and poetry teacher at Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington.

Clare Cooper Marcus is professor emerita in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the principal of Healing Landscapes, a consulting firm that specializes in user-needs analysis related to the programming and design of outdoor spaces in healthcare settings. She is internationally recognized for her research on the social and psychological implications of design, particularly urban open space, affordable housing, and environments for children and the elderly. She has lectured and consulted in the United States, Canada, Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Italy, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, and China. Marcus has been recognized for her work with awards from the AIA, ASLA, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has authored, coauthored, and edited numerous publications, including notably Housing As If People Mattered (1986), People Places (1990), House as a Mirror of Self (1995), and Healing Gardens (1999).

From 1986 to 2004, Lily Yeh served as the cofounder, executive director, and lead artist of The Village of Arts and Humanities, a nonprofit organization with the mission to build community through art, learning, land transformation, and economic development located in North Philadephia. Under her leadership of eighteen years, the summer park building project developed into an organization with twenty full-time and part-time employees, hundreds of volunteers, and a $1.3 million budget. The Village became a multi-faceted community building organization with activities such as after-school and weekend programs, greening land transformation, housing renovation, theater, and economic development initiatives. The center works on local, national, and international projects, and is a leading model of community revitalizations throughout the country. Today, the Village of Arts and Humanities serves thousands of low-income people every year.

Yeh'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 transform a barren churchyard with 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.

Born in China, Yeh immigrated 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, Yeh traveled to Beijing in 1989 to show her work at the Central Institute of Fine Art. There, she witnessed the tragic events of Tianamen Square. Over the 1980s, Yeh 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 continues pursuing her vision through her new organization, Barefoot Artists, Inc., which teaches residents and artists how to replicate the Village model in devastated communities around the world.

(Thanks to Americans Who Tell the Truth for parts of Lily's biography)

Tom Borrup is a national leader and innovator in creative community building leveraging cultural and other community assets to advance economic, social, civic, and physical development. His book, the Creative Community Builder's Handbook (2006) provides a step-by-step planning guide for community leaders. Based in Minneapolis, he specializes in strategic planning, community transformation, partnership building, and program evaluation. He pioneered cultural asset mapping and leveraging cultural resources for economic development and civic participation. A prolific writer, Tom speaks and leads workshops across the US. He teaches for the Graduate Program in Arts Administration at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, and for the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts.

Lanzillotto took to the stage in 1993 writing and performing Confessions of a Bronx Tomboy, which premiered at the Manhattan Class Company's Performance Marathon and at the Under One Roof Theater. Theatrical highlights include her public art installation and performance of A Stickball Memoir, curated by City Lore for the 2001 Smithsonian Folk Life Festival; her play Pocketing Garlic, commissioned by Franklin Furnace in 1994; her one woman show How To Wake Up a Marine in a Foxhole, which premiered at the Kitchen Solo Voice s Series in 1998; and her two year site-specific work entitled, a Schapett! (the act of wiping your plate clean with the heel of the brea, and savoring the juices) at the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx, which garnered her inclusion in Franklin Furnace s The History of the Future, a selection of the best performanceart works over the past twenty-five years, in the "Art & Life" category. Lanzillotto s poetry won the 1st annual Paolucci Award given by the Italian American Writers Association. She has taught at Sing Sing, Housing Works, Sarah Lawrence College, Naropa University, Pace University, Liberty High School for New Immigrants, and the Bedford Hills and Bayview Correctional Facilities. Lanzillotto is currently a writer in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Pamela Michael is the cofounder of River of Words, a linked network of people throughout the United States and the world who are committed to teaching the art and poetry of place to young people. A writer, radio producer and host, and the former director of the United Nations Task Force on Media and Education, she has also worked for Save the Children (Egypt), the United States Coalition for Education for All, and many other development and educational organizations. She worked for the Discovery Channel's Educational Division as a curriculum development consultant and was director of marketing and public relations for the San Jose Symphony. Michael is the author of several books, including The Gift of Rivers, The Whole World is Watching: An International Inquiry into Media Involvement in Education, and many magazine, journal, and newspaper articles. Her anthologies of children's art and poetry are used in classrooms around the world. She has taught writing to aspiring and professional writers, as well as teachers, for over twenty years.

Kate Madden Yee is a writer and founding member of Temescal Commons Cohousing in Oakland, California. She writes about spirituality and women's health. Her work has appeared in BioMechanics Magazine, East Bay Express, the East Bay Monthly, Health magazine, Parents' Press, and the Temescal History Project.