New Project Announcement in Florida

Barefoot Artists

From August 10-15, 2017 the Barefoot Artist Organization will visit West Palm Beach, Florida to initiate the Sun Set Park Project (working title, named because of the one time beloved Sunset Lounge filled with jazz and fun). By collaborating with the city’s redevelopment team and Jon Ward, the park’s Community Redevelopment Area Executive Director, we plan to transform the park into a community influenced public space.

More updates to come as the project develops!

The EACH Foundation
Barefoot Artist
We are deeply grateful for the generous grant from The EACH Foundation which empowered our organization to revisit and continue it’s work with the Mei Hwa School Transformation Project in Daxi, Taiwan. It will also enable us to return in September to the Blackfeet community in Browning, Montana where our team plans to work with students from the Heart Butte High School to develop a community project.

“Thank you for empowering us to continue our work!”
-Lily Yeh

The EACH Foundation prides itself on being radically inclusive and open to everyone. We are an egalitarian, ethnically and socio-economically diverse group of 25 civi-minded individuals from all walks of life, trying to make a positive impact in our communities and the world around us. Very simply, our philosophy is to bring positive change through our free physical and intellectual efforts, in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Skibbereen Arts Festival 2017 in Ireland

The Barefoot Artist film is screening at the Skibbereen Arts Festival 2017!

Skibbereen Arts Festival
Town Hall
August 1, 2017
More details here.

Art is everywhere in West Cork, Ireland in the scenery, in the people and in the atmosphere.

During the Skibbereen Arts Festival Wests Cork becomes one big art gallery with a world-class programme of music, film, theatre, exhibitions, poetry, installations, workshops, walks, talks and a spectacular 1970s street disco. This year it celebrates the arts as a positive force in areas of conflict around the world and in the field of mental health. We also focus on national and local history and of course ‘disco’!

Maryland Institute College of Art Visit

“It was a privilege for me to hear their voices and feel their inspiration.” -Lily Yeh

(March 7, 2017) Lily Yeh’s visit first and second year students at the graduate program of Community Arts at MICA. The students are mature, committed, smart, and creative! They will walk into society as torches of light fueled by the knowledge, disciplines and purpose from the faculty and classmates of their department and mission of MICA, Maryland Institute College of Art. 

 

Coming April 2017

Mei Hwa Transformation Project Phase III

Barefoot Artist

Mei Hwa Transformation Project 2016

In Daxi, Taiwan the Mei Hwa Elementary School will be entering phase III of the Mei Hwa Transformation Project this April.  Learn more about the project here.

Community Design

In Gao Hsung, Taiwan the Barefoot Artist organization will be working with Zi Zhu Ling Shi and communities on art and mural design.

‘We’re still here:’ Artists seek to restore pride, color in Blackfeet lives

Missourian Newspaper



HEART BUTTE – There’s a beauty in this Blackfeet reservation town that a sunrise on the Rocky Mountain Front can only match.

It has to do with the proud, fierce and buffalo-rich lords of the plains, their horses and guns and a way of life that once seemed like it would last forever.

But it has to do too with terrible things – smallpox infestations, a massacre on the Marias in 1870, the Starvation Winter of 1883-84, the devastating flood of 1964, the fire that forced evacuation of Heart Butte just two summers ago.

And it has to do with Heart Butte itself, rising stark behind Heart Butte School but hidden from the rest of town. With enough prompting, Jeremiah Hinkle will tell you why.

An soft-spoken high school junior, Hinkle was thinking about that very thing as he rode the bus to school last week at daybreak.

“I don’t really think about what happened on the mountain,” said Hinkle, who sports glasses, a mustache and a goatee. “It’s more a respect for the mountain, a respect for nature.”

In this century the Southern Pikunni huddle here in wooden houses, at a time of year when their ancestors would have been settling in for the winter on the Teton River around Choteau. The arctic winds don’t blow so hard down there.

“A lot of the culture we had came from nature,” Hinkle said. “We learned how to hunt like a wolf, watched how they hunt together in a pack as a team. We got our shelter from buffalo. We learned how to be sly from the coyote.

“That respect for nature. … It can be powerful. It can be peaceful.”

Those are words to cling to for Sally Thompson and Lily Yeh.

Thompson is an anthropologist from Missoula who has spent much of the past 30 years studying the rich textures of Blackfeet society. She’s convinced that the best way to come to grips with the poverty, substance abuse and hopelessness so prevalent on the reservation is for the people themselves to come to grips with that proud and terrible past.

Yeh is all in.

The diminutive artist was born in China but has spent most of her life in the United States, when she’s not globe-trotting to some of the most destitute and broken outposts in the world. She is a global superstar at what she does, helping communities transform the bleak and ugly into monuments of color and beauty.

And Yeh, who lives in Philadelphia, has the Blackfeet Reservation firmly in her sights.

Continue reading here.

Gorlitz, Germany Update 1 Gorlitz, Germany Update 1

Spanish Version Available

A colleague noted that the Barefoot Artists generally create projects only in places of extreme poverty, even though there is Anja copysuffering and brokenness in comparatively rich communities.  Germany is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and Gorlitz is a beautiful, medieval town with a historical city intact, yet there is wounding here that runs deep.  Perhaps that is why artists from all over the world are drawn to Gorlitz, awakened by the unformed potential that lies within darkness, the vitality and hope that is held within the rubble and decay.  The question that arises seems to be, “how do we respond to the unfolding of the individual soul as it wants to reconnect to the soul of Gorlitz?”

Anja, a local artist, expresses it this way: “Gorlitz has a big soul.  This soul touches your own soul, every time, every movement, it sees your heart.  So many people here are depressed and not in touch with their own souls; we don’t learn to touch our soul.  We fight against our soul which causes us to become deficit.  If we can see our soul, we can blossom and fall in-love with ourselves and find peace.  That is what Gorlitz tells me.”

The Barefoot Artists team is sharing the methodology in creating story poles with people.  In this process we first set up a nurturing environment for participants’ personal stories to emerge.  We aim that the stories unfold in simple narratives which then find expression in visual images.  Based on the individual expressions, the team members work together to find a common language that encompasses our emotions and inspirations. This common language provides a foundation for a public art installation, which is rooted in both personal experiences as well as collective memories of Gorlitz.

The project in Gorlitz is taking place at an old factory site that now houses an NGO as well as studios for various tradesmen.  Numerous brick buildings are in various stages of decay. Tomato plants are thriving in a garden designed by youth groups and built on a large mound of rubble.  Bohemian Crossings will host a summer camp this week where school children will create story poles to add to the team’s poles.  We aspire that through working together, we can create a beauty that transforms this site and generates a rippling affect in bringing hope and joy to Gorlitz.

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Gorlitz, Germany Update 2 Gorlitz, Germany Update 2

Spanish Version Available 

Danielle Hoefler, an artist and advocate, came to Gorlitz six years ago and is the main organizing force behind Bohemian IMG_3945Crossings.  She is a strong, passionate and compassionate presence who believes that the depression weighing down some in the community is rooted in a lack of hope.  She shares, “the inhabitants who were born in Gorlitz don’t necessarily see the beauty that exists here.” The city is largely comprised of an aging population, many of whom spent large portions of their lives living under communist-rule and even before that, for some, the Nazi regime.  “Then one day,” she continues, “completely out of the blue the wall comes down and their lives were entirely different, changed overnight.  They suddenly found themselves in a world they just didn’t know and understand.  Everything was lost.”

With the fall of the wall came a mass exodus of 1/3 of Gorlitz’s population, the closure of most all the factories and major regional industries.  For a time, the area became almost lawless and developed into a large center for the drug market and home to Russian and Polish mafias.  Today alcoholism, drug addiction and poverty continue to feed the despair.

As more of our days unfold here in Gorlitz, it becomes easier to sense the melancholy; there is a feeling of reticence on the streets.  We begin to see beyond the initial delight of relatively quiet and peaceful streets, wondering instead what loneliness and emptiness this might convey.  A large part of the vision of Bohemian Crossings is to create a safe and free space for people to express themselves, not in isolation but in community.  Yet the challenges inherent to building community can quickly and easily disperse energy and positive intention.  Many of us know the frustration expressed in the phrase “herding cats.”  In Germany, as we learned within just a few days of our arrival, the phrase is “herding a bag of fleas.”

IMG_1185

In community-building it is often important to give people open and free space for expression; certainly here there seems to be a strong need for feelings and experiences to be given shape and form.  To succeed in working together, we need to listen to each other’s stories; but we also need to elevate these to another level, channeling the energy, moods and voices into a harmonious chorus.  Choreographing the cats or fleas, as it were, somehow creating a cohesive art piece, for instance, that represents the collective vision.  With the poles we try to find a rhythm, simplicity and repetitive pattern that can serve this purpose – a common language in color, shapes and lines which express diverse emotions and experiences.

When this doesn’t happen, when the beauty we might have imagined is not achieved, it is easy to feel disappointment.  Certainly this has been the experience of Barefoot Artists in many of our efforts.  We understand that there are powerful art forms that are provocative and confrontational to existing systems, relying often on strong, individualistic voices.  The goal of Barefoot Artists, however, is to create a cohesive expression that includes the individual voices of all participants.

The intention of Bohemian Crossings is to provide and open space in which every person, through arts and creativity, can discover the potential and the beauty within.  It is their hope that the energy and joy created through the process can help transform the mood and inertia of the city. Working with this group of talented, courageous and open individuals is providing us with an amazing opportunity to explore the potent dance between the individual and the collective.  It is a chance to ask more questions, understand the process better and learn together how to take the next step.

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Gorlitz, Germany Update 3 Gorlitz, Germany Update 3

Spanish Version Available

Working with Youth

This week, Bohemian Crossings summer camp has welcomed youth groups to the site to create story poles.  We have been delighted to meet little ones from a day care, a group from the refugee community, elementary classes from a public school as well as secondary-age youth from the local Waldorf school.  Poles are decorated with paint, buttons or are carved.  The younger ones practice first on a large roll of paper before working together to paint a large pole with hand prints and dripping paints.  The older youth scatter immediately into groups of two or three with drills and carving tools in hand.  Adults from the community occasionally stop by and create their own design and pole.  The energy is spontaneous, feels welcoming and diverse.

The Bohemian Crossings team themselves are a diverse group of artists who bring talent for poetry, storytelling, music and the visual arts to the gathering.  After the children wash up from all the stray paint that never made it to the pole, they gather around team members who play the guitar, banjo and

harmonica, singing folk songs from America, Ireland and Germany. They smile, clap and join in with the singing.

The inability to control the result of such unfolding of enthusiasm and energy was at first unsettling, at least requiring in us a shift from our original vision of a sort of unified, cohesive outcome.  Yet what is arising feels potent.  Within the team, there seems to be a blending of the diverse personalities and, at times, competing energies; a sense of order is forming out of what felt initially to be a chaotic, empty space; we feel our connection deepening with the shared desire to create beauty.

The cohesion, however, doesn’t come just from our efforts; instead, it seems to take shape through the youth.  The harmony, the common language we adults have been talking (sometimes arguing) about for the past days is here. What is the common language?  It probably won’t be obviously visible in a public art piece.  Our poles will form a random forest of color and shapes that can, we hope, at least be a physical seed of hope to inspire the unfolding of similar efforts over the years.  No. The common language, the harmonious note is this:  joy – a light that so gracefully absorbs the grey.

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