In this post, Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center (AFC), highlights the 2024 accomplishments of the AFC. The post demonstrates how 2024 was a busy and productive year for the American Folklife Center, as it continued to meet its mission to document and share the many expressions of human experience to inspire, revitalize, and perpetuate living cultural traditions.
In 2024, Los Pleneros de la 21--a NYC-based organization whose members specialize in teaching and performing the Puerto Rican musical genres of bomba and plena--were awarded with a Community Collections Grant (CCG) by the American Folklife Center, to document musicians, teachers, and community members involved in bomba and plena music in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This post is an excerpt of an interview with LeAna López, the primary interviewer for the project, about the group's CCG work. The full interview is accessible on the Library of Congress' Of the People blog.
In this post, Nancy Groce (Senior Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center) highlights a new exhibition organized by Los Herederos -- a 2023 recipient of a Community Collections Grant (CCG) from the American Folklife Center -- that celebrates the cultural diversity of Queens, New York.
This post is an excerpt of a longer interview with Alex Lumelsky, COO and Creative Director for the Chaldean News, about the 2024 Community Collections Grant (CCG) project, Chaldeans: Portrait of an Evolving Community. The excerpt links to the original post on the Library's Of the People: Widening the Path blog.