The Barefoot Artists

02/28/2026

Last weekend to view the "Breaking Down Walls" exhibition at Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. The show highlights Lily Yeh's project with inmates at Graterford Prison. March 1st is the last day of the exhibition.

A portal can be a gate to connect spaces, a passage to a state of mind, or a door to a different time. For the artists Emanuel Martinez (b. 1947) and Lily Yeh (b. 1941), creating art with incarcerated communities is an opportunity to build portals through prison walls. Breaking Down Walls: Art as a....

01/02/2026

Lily Yeh and the team at Barefoot Artists wish you a very happy new year!

10/13/2025

The installation of the mosaic mural designed by Lily Yeh to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dandelion Middle School continues one panel at a time. Here in this series of photos, you can see the process for installing each panel. Once the mosaicked image has been completed, it is covered with plastic that has an adhesive one side. This binds the tiles together, so that they can be held vertically and adhered to the wall. The wall is covered with a thin layer of concrete, and once the mosaic panel adheres to the wall, the plastic sheeting is removed and finishing touches are made to the mosaic.

10/06/2025

Lily Yeh's design for Phase 2 of the monumental mosaic project at Dandelion Middle School in Beijing blends characters from Chinese mythology and fantastical creatures into a swirling cosmic tapestry that extends across 22 sections along the western perimeter of the school yard. As Golden Week draws to a close we've made great strides including the completion of the 4 sections pictured here.

10/04/2025

It’s Golden Week, a national holiday in China, and work continues on Phase 2 of the monumental mosaic mural project at Dandelion Middle School in Beijing. The students are gone, but we have had dozens of volunteers providing critical support. Here, photos of some of the volunteers that have generously given there time and energy to the project. Thank you so much! We couldn’t do this without you. ❤️

09/23/2025

Lily is back at Dandelion Middle School leading the second phase of the mosaic mural project on the west wall of the campus. She has created designs for the 22 ‘panels’ on either side of the completed Dandelion Tree of Life mural, drawing inspiration from Chinese mythology. Today, she led guided students in the mosaicking process.

09/11/2025

Photos from "Breaking Down Walls," an exhbition organized by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and on view at the the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington, DC. The exhibition showcases Lily Yeh's work with inmates at Graterford Prison and Emanuel Martinez' work with prisoners in The Emanuel Project. On view through January 18th, 2026.

09/03/2025

Work that was created during Lily's workshops at Graterford Prison is part of an exhibition at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art opening this Friday, September 5th and continuing through January 18th, 2026.

"A portal can be a gate to connect spaces, a passage to a state of mind, or a door to a different time. For the artists Emanuel Martinez (b. 1947) and Lily Yeh (b. 1941), creating art with incarcerated communities is an opportunity to build portals through prison walls. Breaking Down Walls: Art as a Portal for the Incarcerated highlights the efforts of artists to create transformative experiences in carceral facilities.

Breaking Down Walls features letters, photographs, exhibition flyers, scrapbooks, and other primary source documents from the collections of Emanuel Martinez and Lily Yeh. The exhibition focuses on two prison art projects: The Emanuel Project and the Graterford Prison Project. From 1998 to 2001, Yeh worked with inmates serving life sentences at State Correctional Institution – Graterford in Pennsylvania. Since 2009, Martinez has collaborated with incarcerated youth around the nation to create murals in their facilities. The documents displayed here have been selected to offer insight into the experiences of making art directly from those who organized and participated in these projects. Martinez and Yeh endeavored to use art as a tool of healing for inmates and their communities.

This exhibition is co-curated by Christina Ayson-Plank and Ricky Gomez of the Archives of American Art. The Archives of American Art is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available to all the primary sources documenting the visual arts of the United States."

A portal can be a gate to connect spaces, a passage to a state of mind, or a door to a different time. For the artists Emanuel Martinez (b. 1947) and Lily Yeh (b. 1941), creating art with incarcerated communities is an opportunity to build portals through prison walls. Breaking Down Walls: Art as a....

08/21/2025

Sorry our social media feeds have been quiet recently. Lily Yeh is working in the studio on a huge mosaic project in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of Dandelion Middle School in Beijing. We’ll be sharing a glimpse into that process soon.

As we prepare for Lily’s return to China, we want to let you know that a simple way to support Lily and The Barefoot Artists is by donating frequent flyer miles. If you fly a lot for work or are otherwise a hyper-frequent flyer, please consider donating miles to Barefoot Artists. Unfortunately miles aren’t tax-deductible, but you’ll have our heartfelt gratitude. And we’ll send you a postcard from China!

If you are interested in discussing the possibility of donating Miles, you can message us here or through our website: https://www.barefootartists.org/contact

07/07/2025

Barefoot Artists continues to support agricultural projects in the Twa Villages in Rwanda, and we recently expanded support to the Bugeshi Gasiza Twa group. In this interview, Biryumurame Samuel, one of the residents of that community explains how the support has impacted him and his family.

"After growing the potatoes, we ate some and sold the rest!
This allowed us to grow more! From now on, we will continue to work the land because it has changed our lives! With the vegetables from our garden, mixed with the potatoes, we have enough to eat! Child malnutrition has significantly decreased!
Our community no longer begs, and especially no longer steals!
We thank our benefactor who changed our lives! We will continue working the land, which will change our lives forever."