Epilogue

The epilogue is by James Early, former director of cultural heritage at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural. His long tenure extends across his experiences as a graduate student researcher in the 1970s, supportive assistant secretary, curator, international spokesperson, mentor, and champion of the Festival’s potential for advancing cultural democracy. In this piece, he reflects on the Festival's past and legacies and looks forward, raising questions about future inclinations and directions.

The Bristol Sessions: The Big Bang of Country Music—Music and Culture in the South-Central Appalachians

This chapter details the curatorial decisions that defined thematic focus and scope, participant selection, and site design and organization for a 2003 program about Appalachian culture. The author recounts the challenges of organizing and fund-raising for a multi-state program in worsening financial times. He also describes how the Smithsonian worked with its partners, the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance and East Tennessee State University, to develop a program that demonstrated the breadth of Appalachian culture. These efforts dispelled many of the stereotypes that have historically plagued these communities

Prologue

The prologue reflects on the relationship of conventional museum curatorial practice to Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial practices. In particular, it examines the multiple mediations in which Festival curators are involved and the process of “presenting” artists and participants to the public. It raises questions about the perils of objectification of artists within these “living exhibitions” and argues for dialogic approaches to developing Festival programs that incorporate participatory or community curation.

Agency, Reciprocal Engagement, and Applied Folklore Practice: Beyond the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

This chapter focuses on the participatory research projects African Immigrant Folklife and Will to Adorn: African American Style, Community, Identity, which provided fieldwork training that has yielded documentation for the planning of Smithsonian Folklife Festivals and other projects. The author reflects on the applied aspects of public folklore, describing a curatorial approach that prioritizes commitment to community self-determination and building reciprocal research-learning relationships between Smithsonian staff and community-based cultural researchers.

Next Year in Washington: The Jerusalem Program—Postponement and Rebirth

This chapter describes a program initiated in 1992 that brought together Muslim and Jewish researchers to document the cultural assets of their communities in Jerusalem. Though this work did not materialize into a Folklife Festival program, it laid the groundwork for several innovative and ongoing projects. The author chronicles the project’s ethnographic phase in the early 1990s, the cancellation of the Festival program in 1994, and the continuation of the project as a university course and study tour. She interrogates the notion of parallel self-determination as a methodology and demonstrates the complexity of curating in zones of conflict.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Many Auspicious Doors

This chapter uses the 2008 Bhutan program to examine visitor experience and the role of curators in crafting these experiences. Using the suggestive possibilities of a portable Buddhist shrine featured in the program and basing the analysis on 20 years of experience working with the Festival and its evaluation, the author lays out a framework for analyzing four levels of Festival visitor engagement: Level 1—Sensory Cultural Enlightenment/Being Present; Level 2—Choosing a Route/Moving Through; Level 3—Viewing and Taking part in the Live Performance/Active Experiencing; and Level 4—Revealing the Deeper Layers/Discovering More. The chapter concludes with observations about visitor studies relevant to museums as well as festivals.

Imagining a Collaborative Curatorial Relationship: A Reordering of Authority over Representation

This chapter addresses the involvement of participants in the curatorial process as it plays out—often in contestation among participants, program staff, and partner entities—in Festival–framed time and space. Drawing from programs involving Latino, Latin American, American Indian, and Caribbean communities, it explores different strategies and degrees of curatorial collaborations with the featured cultural groups and the effectiveness of the “re-ordering of power relationships,” if only during the Festival. The author reflects on the complexities that challenge collaboration in cultural production and argues for a shift from a strictly performance framework to a more discursive practice that seeks to engage the featured communities and participants as central players in curatorial decision making.

Introduction

The volume editors frame and contextualize Smithsonian Folklife Festival history with attention to the role of curatorial practice in mediating and negotiating the concerns and interests of the event’s varied publics and stakeholders. The editors address how the articles create a step towards systematically examining institutional Festival principles and the particular curatorial process of the Festival, unpacking the challenges, responsibilities, and forms of conversation that cultural representation entails; the ideals upon which the Festival is based; and places of friction and contestation that arise among the many parties involved in producing it.

How Folklorists Changed the World: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a Catalyst for Change

This chapter traces the influence of certain programmatic priorities, philosophies, and strategies on shaping the vision of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the ways in which certain Festival notions of art and cultural equity have since suffused American culture. Tracing the impact of the Festival from a personal vantage point, the author explores the Festival's history, suggesting the under-acknowledged contribution of folklorists to American culture and the way the Festival has become a model for other nationally acclaimed organizations such as City Lore in New York City and Story Corps, events such as the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and for media productions such as the Moth Radio Hour.

Cuba—Confluencias, Creatividad y Color: The Making of a Cuba Folklife Festival Project

This chapter examines the complications and challenges unique to developing a Cuba Festival program in collaboration with Cuban governmental partners at agencies such as the Cuban Institute for Cultural Research Juan Marinello. Given fifty years of diplomatic isolation, the author, assigned to curate a program that as of 2015 had not come to fruition, explores the implications of the collaborative research and training project for cultural diplomacy and cultural policy in both Cuba and the United States.