The American Folklife Center is excited to announce the online availability of an excellent fieldwork collection of interviews and videos of cultural events created through its Community Collection Grants (CCG)! “Lao Buddhist New Year Festival in Southern Louisiana,” documents the Louisiana Lao New Year Festival presented in 2022 by Wat Thammarattanaram, a Buddhist temple and monastery in Broussard (Iberia Parish), Louisiana. A community-based research team conducted interviews and captured video of events, ceremonies, and celebrations. Find links to the collection in this blog post.
The American Folklife Center proudly announces the availability of an online collection of documentary field research created through the Community Collections Grants (CCG) program. Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala is an initiative of the research team of Mark Boots Keahi aʻamau pio ʻole i ka poli o Pele Lupenui (project director, interviewer, and musician), Adam Palya (videographer), and Cheryl Lupenui (project manager). Their year-long efforts have resulted in this unique collection of video recordings, song sheets, and photographs that document generations-old “heirloom songs” of the Kohala region in the northwest portion of the island of Hawai’i.
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.
Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce announces a new American Folklife Center archival collection, the Warp and Weft of Yap’s Outer Islands: Backstrap Weaving in Micronesia, as supported through the Center's Community Collections Grant program.
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.
Below is an excerpt from a post on the Library’s Of the People blog by Folklife Specialist Guha Shankar who interviews Community Collections Grant recipient Professor Tammy Greer (and team) about their project, “And We are Still Here:” Stories of Resilience and Sustainability from Houma Culture Bearers in Louisiana. This post is part of the Of the …
Below is an excerpt from an interview by Folklife Specialist Guha Shankar with Community Collections Grant recipient Mark “Boots” Lupenui entitled, “Heirloom Songs” from Kohala, Hawai’i: Documenting a Fragile Musical Legacy, as part of a series on the Library’s Of the People blog featuring the 2022 awardees of the AFC’s Community Collections Grants program. The …
