In 2023, the American Folklife Center awarded folklorist Selina Morales with an Archie Green Fellowship to interview traditional healers living and working in Puerto Rico. Morales, in collaboration with filmmaker Alexis Garcia, used the fellowship to create a new Occupational Folklife Project collection, titled “Healing Work in Puerto Rico.” In this post, Morales and Garcia discuss their collection with Dr. Nancy Groce (Senior Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center).
The state of Minnesota is home to many traditions, communities, and forms of expressive culture. In this post, we highlight collection materials from the American Folklife Center pertaining to the folklife and cultural heritage of the North Star State.
In this COVID Recollections post, we continue to commemorate the 5th anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by highlighting the COVID-19 Street Art Archive—an online, archival collection of street art related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This post features an interview with Dr. Heather Shirey (Professor of Art History, University of St. Thomas) and Dr. Todd Lawrence (Associate Professor of English, University of St. Thomas), who created the COVID-19 Street Art archive. Shirey and Lawrence discuss their inspiration for the archive, their favorite items in the collection, and their thoughts on archiving art that is intended to be temporary. The COVID-19 Street Art Archive is just one of many collections available on the American Folklife Center's COVID-19 Research Guide. Find more at https://guides.loc.gov/covid-19-folklife.
In an attempt to inspire herself and others to finish handmade gifts for the holidays, Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas takes readers on a quick tour of hand-crafted items documented in the Center’s field survey collections.
The digital records collection of the AIDS Memorial Quilt--the largest folk arts project in history commemorating those lost to HIV/AIDS--was published on the Library of Congress' website on December 1 (World AIDS Day 2024). This milestone marks over ten years of collaboration between the American Folklife Center, the National AIDS Memorial (NAM), and the NAMES Project Foundation to preserve and steward the AIDS Memorial Quilt Records Collection. In this post, Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center, recounts the history of this collaboration and the years of work that led to the online publication.
The American Folklife Center recently acquired the collection of Tom Pich—an acclaimed photographer of traditional artists. Pich is best known for his photographs of recipients of the National Heritage Fellowship—the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts presented annually by the National Endowment for the Arts. In this celebratory post, AFC Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce highlights the importance of this acquisition, contextualizes Tom Pich's work, and details the beauty of his photographs.
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.
In June 2024, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi had a special viewing of the AIDS Memorial Quilt Records stewarded by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. This post details Pelosi's visit to the Library, her previous work to advocate for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the work American Folklife Center staff to steward these valuable collections.
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 …
