Pamela Badila is a folkteller artist and co-founder, along with her late husband Elombe Badila, of the Diata Diata International Folkloric Theatre. Pamela Badila is a visual and performing artist with a background in education. As part of of Diata Diata...
Maxwell Kofi Donkor is an internationally recognized artist and master cultural educator who is most known for his performances and teaching of African Drumming and Dance, through the Sankofa African Drum and Dance Ensemble. For many decades, he has focused on...
FELIX NELSON was born in 1988 and grew up in the Jamestown area of Accra. He followed in the footsteps of his talented parents to become a highly skilled musician, singer, dancer and dance educator. Felix came to the US in 2006 to join his father Zorkie in upstate NY...
Today, I exited off the Michigan Avenue Exit ramp of Schenectady's I-890, and smiled. Looming in front of me was the mural that was created at the end of June 2024 by Raè Frasier of Art Money, three students enrolled in the Schenectady Job Training Agency's after...
Karen Sell is a modern practitioner of
the age-old craft of wig making. A native
of Singapore, Karen studied hairstyling in
England, where she also took a course in wig
making. She worked as a stylist for the Vidal
Sassoon salons in London, then later in New
York when she immigrated to this country in
the late 1980s. In New York, she also worked
as a stylist at a salon that made wigs. There,
she styled and maintained wigs for clients,
then established her own wig-making business
about fifteen years ago.
We all know that time flies when we’re having
fun. As for me, I can scarcely believe that
thirty years have passed since the summer
of 1979, when Valerie Ingram and I, both
recent Cooperstown “folkies,” organized a
conference we called Getting the “Lore” Back
to the “Folk” for anyone interested in folklore,
particularly applied folklore, as it was called
in those days. It was the ’70s, and this was
a new field.
I was born in 1950 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
I started carving at age twenty-two,
when my father gave me a gift of a
painted wood-carving he had made of me
at the farm where I grew up. This gift from
my father inspired me to begin to make my
own carved and painted pictures. Since then
I’ve made more than one thousand pieces in
thirty-five years. I think of my pictures as a
visual diary that helps me make sense of the
events and feelings of my life.
I was raised in a small community called West Mountain, in the southern Adirondacks of New York. Family and friends all lived near one another, giving me a great out-of-the-way place to grow up. I am a third-generation quilter and fourth-generation seamstress. My grandmother, Viola White LaPier, taught me at a very early age how to make crazy quilts. I remember at age five or six going to my uncles’ lumber camp. While she cooked meals for the lumbermen, I would sit next to the wood stove stringing quilt triangles that she had cut out of old, worn wool pants. My great grandmother, Fanny Newton White, made the family’s clothing by hand, without the aid of a modern-day pattern. She could cut out and construct a dress just by looking at another one. I’m fortunate to have inherited some of those skills.
New York Folklore recently announced $225,000 in grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). These funds are the result of 21 successful applications submitted to NYSCA by New York Folklore on behalf of folk and traditional artists in the Capital Region. New York Folklore hosted an awards reception to celebrate this great achievement by folk and traditional artists in the region on February 23 at The Linda, WAMC-Albany’s public radio network’s Performing Arts Studio. The celebration featured food representing the grantees heritages.
The 2022 Mohawk Hudson Folklife Festival was a spectacular sequel to the first festival hosted in 2021. We were thrilled that Mohawk Valley-based photographer Kevin Hoehn made the trip to Albany to photograph our event. There he found the crafts, arts, music, and dance from the communities who have made a home from New York’s Montgomery to Columbia Counties.
Over the years, I have met some amazing photographers and artists who, like myself, are captivated with the South Shore bay houses of Long Island. One of those people was artist Dan Pollera, who passed away in March 2022….Another artist who we admire is Kathy Herzy of West Islip, who has painted numerous scenes of traditional maritime activities, including clamming, birdwatching, waterfowl scenes, and traditional boats and fish houses.
It was in my fingers!” Ellen Fjermedal explained. Ellen, a demure, but determined and spry elder, started drawing when she was a child in Arendal, on the south coast of Norway. Now living in Victor, New York, she has a studio and display area at home where she paints rosemaling (Norwegian) or kurbits (Swedish) decorations.
You need to read this book [Annie Lanzillotto’s L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir} because it’s the most powerful depiction I have ever read of how a human being can draw on her folk culture, her humor, and her poetic insight to pull life-affirming meaning out of the gutter like a lost Spaldeen.
“(Re-)Making Irish Lace” attempted to understand how a particular art form has been interpreted by different groups of people, locally and abroad, for nearly 200 years, comparing past and recent practice…how the unfurling story of Irish lace is playing out in the daily lives of Buffalonians.
The papier-mâché vejigante masks of Amil Droz Torres, an artist from Puerto Rico who also worked part-time in Saratoga Springs “were an important component of the Carnaval de Vejigantes, the annual celebration held in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Begun in 1991, but with roots...