Smithsonian Folklife

The National Park Service recently sent us these photos of the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival taken from their helicopter.

We're traveling to Mali to consult on community engagement in museums, researching legends about atomic bomb testing, attending folklore conferences so we can steal ideas, examining the shift of Asian American identities, and so much more. Read all about it in our new issue of Talk Story: Culture in Motion!

Check out this piece of Folklife Festival fan art by Katie King! Recognize the Zhenjiang Wu Opera Troupe? 

Clay sculpture of Barack Obama created by Fu Xinyue at the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival says: DON'T FORGET TO VOTE TODAY!

Read about the dap's history and evolution on Talk Story: http://bit.ly/1odnKKM.

Cross-cultural #education and active hands-on learning are a huge part of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. We want to make sure our...

Watch this one hour documentary film exploring the Tibetan diaspora, based on the 2000 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. 

The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage asks educators on Edutopia if they've ever used our free resources? Contribute your experiences here: http://bit.ly/1lKjved 

We continue to be blown away by the moments captured by visitors at the ‪‎2014 Folklife‬ Festival. If you have photos from this year's Festival, we invite you to share them on our open ‪‎Flickr Group - it's grown to over 2,000 photos!

Check out more resources from the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage here.

“Although I can’t understand their language, I feel we are from the same ancestor,” says Liang Xiaoying, one of the performers from Guizhou. “We are the same people. I feel happy and immediately at home around them.” 

Watch a time lapse of an artist's indigenous pottery techniques of Kenya's Oriang community.

Click the picture above to check out the first fieldwork photos from Lima, Peru, for the 2015 Folklife Festival!

Read more from our latest Talk Story, "Just Dance: Connection Life, Death, Traditions, and Communities in L.A." 

Through sublime rhymes, poet Pages Matam paid tribute to his Cameroonian mother on "Diaspora Day" at the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Hosted by Bomani D. Armah, organized by Busboys and Poets and co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the session explored cultural expressions from local African and Asian Diasporas

Read on here.

Folklife Festivals come and go – just as soon as one ends, we begin to prepare for the next! However, each Festival creates meaningful relationships and future opportunities to share cultural heritage and living traditions. This week, the 2013 Folklife Festival lives on in an exchange co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia (Embajada de Estados Unidos en Bolivia) and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The first part of the exchange brought six Kallawaya medicinal practitioners and textile weavers from the Andean highlands of Bolivia to the U.S. to participate in the 2013 Festival program One World, Many Voices. The second part happened just this week and brought members of Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians to Bolivia with the goal of introducing indigenous Bolivians to Native American experts on language and cultural heritage revitalization in the United States. Read more here on the Folklife website: http://bit.ly/1kVZsJ1