What does this grant fund?
The Folk & Traditional Arts Mini Grant offers quick response small-scaled grants ranging from $500 to $1,000 to individuals and organizations practicing or supporting folk traditions. The Folk and Traditional Arts Program supports projects that are developed in close consultation and collaboration with the communities whose traditions are to be presented. Individuals and organizations are encouraged to use folklorists, ethnomusicologists or other specialists for documentation, program development, interpretation, and program production. Projects supported by the Folk Arts Program are strengthened when they include interpretive components designed to aid audiences in appreciating a tradition’s meaning, artistic significance, and its social, cultural and historical contexts.
What are folk and traditional arts?
Folk Arts are traditional cultural expressions through which a group maintains and passes on its shared way of life. Folk Arts are usually learned informally through performance, by example, or in oral traditions among families, friends, neighbors and co-workers rather than through formal education. Never static, folk arts change, as they are adapted to new circumstances while they maintain their traditional qualities. Traditional folk arts are practiced by different ethnic, regional, familial, occupational, and religious groups, as well as by other kinds of communities with a common identity. They include: performing traditions in music, dance, and drama; traditional storytelling and other verbal arts; festivals; traditional crafts, visual arts, architecture, the adornment and transformation of the built environment, and other kinds of material folk culture; and oral histories that focus on shared traditions within a community.