The American Folklife Center (AFC) is proud to announce a new research guide, which highlights AFC collections related to the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Heritage Fellowship is the highest honor for the traditional arts in the United States. Since 1982, the award has recognized lifetime achievement among traditional artists and advocates for the traditional arts. On Friday, September 29, 2023, the American Folklife Center will be hosting a public ceremony to honor the 2023 recipients of the National Heritage Fellowship. Awardees of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 National Heritage Fellowship will also be celebrated, as the COVID-19 pandemic inhibited their in-person recognition. Find about about the new guide and the ceremony in this blog post!
On Wednesday, July 5, and Friday, July 7, 2023, the American Folklife Center (AFC) welcomed a delegation of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American musicians to the Library of Congress. The musicians—Shchuka-Ryba, Bozhychi, Mariya Kvitka, Yaroslav Dzhus, Katya Chilly, and Ukrainian Village Voices—traveled to Washington, D.C. to perform at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Joining the groups were representatives from the Maidan Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, and Dr. James Deutsch—a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Find out about their visit, and about many of AFC's Ukrainian collections and programs, in this blog post!
As part of the AFC’s Homegrown Foodways in Central New Jersey film series, this blog premieres the film "Multigenerational Ukrainian Foodways with Roman Kovbasniuk," which honors New Jersey's vibrant Ukrainian communities and their rich foodways traditions. Watch it in this blog post, or on the Library's YouTube channel!
The following is a guest post by folklorist Sally Van de Water, Folklife Programs Manager, Division of Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County, New Jersey. The post introduces AFC’s Homegrown Foodways in Central New Jersey film series, a collaboration with Van de Water and colleagues at the Division of Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County.
We're continuing the Homegrown Plus Premiere series with Julian Kytasty, a third generation player of the bandura, a Ukrainian stringed instrument with similarities to the lute and the zither. Julian also sings beautifully and composes for the bandura and other instruments. In this blog you'll find an embedded concert video, an interview video, and a set of related links to explore!
“Now, this tablecloth,” Taissa Decyk says, “I was in a camp expecting my first child, who is now thirty-one, when I made this tablecloth.” In September 1979, Mrs. Taissa Decyk was interviewed in her Providence home about her extensive knowledge of Ukrainian embroidery traditions. Conducted by folklorist Geraldine Niva Johnson, the interview was for the …
The Ethnic Heritage and Language Schools in America Project was conducted in the summer of 1982 by the American Folklife Center to survey selected religious and secular ethnic community-based schools conducted, at least in part, in a language other than English to document the continued ethnolinguistic and cultural diversity of the United States. This collection …
One frequent piece of advice for helping to keep our sense of well being as we need to stay home and stay safe during the pandemic is to find ways to be creative. Arts and crafts provide one way of doing this. I grew up with arts and crafts of all sorts as members of …
In the Homegrown Plus series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both together in an easy-to-find blog post. (Find the whole series here!) We’re continuing the series with Harmonia, a band from Cleveland, Ohio, which presents both rural and urban folk music of Eastern Europe, ranging from the Danube to the …