Books published by New Village Press

Ready-to-go, vetted approaches for facilitating artistic environmental projectsHow do we educate those who feel an urgency to address our environmental and social challenges? What ethical concerns do art-makers face who are committed to a deep green agenda? How can we refocus education to emphasize integrative thinking and inspire hope? What role might art play in actualizing environmental resilience?Compiled from 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, Ecoart in Action stands as a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges. Organized into three sections¿Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations¿each contribution provides models for ecoart practice that are adaptable for use within a variety of classrooms, communities, and contexts. Educators developing project and place-based learning curricula, citizens, policymakers, scientists, land managers, and those who work with communities (human and other) will find inspiration for integrating art, science, and community-engaged practices into on-the-ground environmental projects. If you share a concern for the environmental crisis and believe art can provide new options, this book is for you!

Useful and inspiring cases illustrate participatory placemaking practices and strategies.How Spaces Become Places tells stories of place makers who respond to daunting challenges of affordable housing, racial violence, and immigration, as well as community building, arts development, safe streets, and coalition-building. The book's thirteen contributors share their personal experiences tackling complex and contentious situations in cities ranging from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and from Paris to Detroit. These activists and architects, artists and planners, mediators and gardeners transform ordinary spaces into extraordinary places.These place makers recount working alongside initially suspicious residents to reclaim and enrich the communities in which they live. Readers will learn how place makers listen and learn, diagnose local problems, convene stakeholders, build trust, and invent solutions together. They will find instructive examples of work they can do within their own communities. In the aftermath of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, the editor argues, these accessible practice stories are more important than ever.

A thorough investigation of how Jane Jacobs¿s ideas about the life and economy of great cities grew from her home city, ScrantonJane Jacobs¿s First City vividly reveals how this influential thinker and writer¿s classic works germinated in the once vibrant, mid-size city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Jane spent her initial eighteen years. In the 1920s and 1930s, Scranton was a place of enormous diversity and opportunity. Small businesses of all kinds abounded and flourished, quality public education was available to and supported by all, and even recent immigrants could save enough to buy a house. Opposing political parties joined forces to tackle problems, and citizens worked together for the public good.Through interviews with contemporary Scrantonians and research of historic newspapers, city directories, and vital records, author Glenna Lang has uncovered Scranton as young Jane experienced it and shows us the lasting impact of her growing up in this thriving and accessible environment. Readers can follow the development of Jane¿s acute observational abilities from childhood through her passion in early adulthood to understand and write about what she saw. Reflecting Jane¿s belief in trusting one¿s own direct observation above all, this volume has been richly illustrated with historic and modern color images that help bring alive a lost Scranton. The book demonstrates why, at the end of Jacobs¿s life, her thoughts and conversations increasingly returned to Scranton and the potential for cohesion and inclusiveness in all cities.

This illustrated modern parable has wisdom for realizing world peace in our time--let us start the dance!

Awakening Creativity shows in gloriously illustrated detail how Lily Yeh guides a participatory process of artistic expression that uplifts a distressed community. Her open, joyful approach to artmaking is a model for building healthy cultural esteem. Lily Yeh is an acclaimed visual artist who has worked with students, community leaders and teachers in Canada, China, Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Syria, Italy and in cities and neighborhoods across the United States. Yeh is considered one of America's most innovative urban designers and social pioneers. Awakening Creativity is her first, much-awaited book.In Awakening Creativity, Yeh facilitates the art-making process for students of The Dandelion School, the only nonprofit organization in Beijing that serves the children of poor migrant workers coming from 24 provinces. Yeh worked with hundreds of students, teachers, volunteers and workers to transform the school's main campus with mural painting, mosaics, and environmental sculpture. Students were involved in every aspect of the art-making, which has become central to the school's curriculum and well-being.Lily Yeh founded Barefoot Artists, a volunteer organization that uses the power of art to revitalize impoverished communities. Yeh is also the co-founder and former director of The Village of Arts and Humanities that has brought to life over 200 abandoned lots in the most distressed districts of North Philadelphia.

Karl Linn's compassion, humanity and insight into what makes good community design--and what, in fact, makes community itself--is exactly what much of the world needs to develop if we are to evolve beyond our current frightful state of affairs. He saw the need for space and safety, beauty and joy in people's lives--especially the lives of poor children--and he filled it by the truckload. His was a quietly heroic life, lived close to the root of what really matters: an understanding that the happiness and peace we create for others is, delightfully, our own.--Alice Walker, author, The Color Purple There was only one Karl Linn--a master at using design to create community and empower people.>Seeing latent beauty and potentials in blighted urban spaces, Karl Linn took actions to realize his vision through gardening, farming and restoring environment. Through the process, he inspired people, built communities, and transformed many public spaces. He made use feel our heart.>We stand on the shoulders of Karl Linn, each of us who acts to creatively reclaim the commons for each and all communities. Karl Linn understood the greatest revolutionary secrets of all: not to fight but to create, not to be alone but to be together, and to recreate our common life beginning with the very ground under our feet!>Foreword by Joanna Macy, Epilogue by Carl Anthony

"Volume 1: Resistance and reconciliation in regions of violence"-title page.

Presenting firsthand accounts, oral histories, and a wealth of underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of anti-war GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance, this text features 14 original essays by leading scholars and activists.

"The story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a a more equitable place."--Provided by the publisher.

Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six cities devastated by war, repression, and dislocation.

Acting Together, Volume ll, continues from where the first volume ends documenting exemplary peacebuilding performances in regions marked by social exclusion structural violence and dislocation. Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Volume I, Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, while Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion.Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence focuses on the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of violence. The performances highlighted in this volume nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, and transformative action, and creatively support communities in grappling with conflicting moral imperatives surrounding questions of justice, memory, resistance, and identity. The individual chapters, written by scholars, conflict resolution practitioners, and artists who work directly with the communities involved, offer vivid firsthand accounts and analyses of traditional and nontraditional performances in Serbia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, Argentina, Peru, India, Cambodia, Australia, and the United States.Complemented by a website of related materials, a documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage, that features clips and interviews with the curators and artists, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," that is included with the documentary as a second disc, this book will inform and inspire socially engaged artists, cultural workers, peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, human rights activists, students of peace and justice studies, and whoever wishes to better understand conflict and the power of art to bring about social change.The Acting Together project is born of a collaboration between Theatre Without Borders and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. The two volumes are edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, director of the aforementioned program and a leading figure in creative approaches to coexistence and reconciliation; Roberto Gutierrez Varea, an award-winning director and associate professor at the University of San Francisco; and Polly O. Walker, director of Partners in Peace, an NGO based in Brisbane, Australia.