Planning & Design
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Folk Arts
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Visual Arts
Robert Baron, Director (212) 741-7755
The Folk Arts Program is devoted to supporting New York State's living cultural heritage of folk arts. Its primary purpose is to maintain the extraordinary cultural and stylistic diversity of folk arts in the State, through supporting programming designed to safeguard and perpetuate traditions practiced within communities. It also supports programming that enables general audiences to experience traditional arts from New York State. While the Program emphasizes support for New York traditions, it also supports programming involving artists from elsewhere when it directly relates to New York State communities and their traditions.
By definition, folk arts are traditional cultural expressions through which a group maintains and passes on its shared way of life. They express a group's sense of beauty, identity, and values. 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 within and among ethnic, regional, occupational, and religious groups as well as 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.
The Program’s priority is to identify and support folk artists of high artistic quality, who must be adequately compensated for their work. The practice of folk arts by traditional artists stems from their birthright, community membership or direct participation in the life of a community. The best folk artists generally spend years to master their art forms. They work within artistic conventions shaped and refined over time while creating innovations recognized by other community members.
The Program supports projects that are developed in close consultation and collaboration with the communities and artists whose traditions are to be presented. Support is not available for programming involving artists who appropriate, interpret, or revive the traditions of other communities. The Program emphasizes support for presentations grounded in the traditional modes of practicing folk art, and not programming involving choreography, theatricalization, or stylization that significantly alters traditions.
Audiences are strongly encouraged to develop appropriate methods of presentation, both for programming within a community where a folk art is traditionally practiced and activities presented to general audiences. Traditions can be revitalized when presented at local social occasions in the community where the folk art flourished in the past. Presentations to general audiences in new settings should maintain the style and content of traditional performances.
The interpretation of a folk arts event aids audiences in understanding what may be an unfamiliar artistic experience. Projects are expected to include interpretive components, such as program booklets or other publications, websites, lecture/demonstrations, spoken introductions to performances, and interpretive signage to aid appreciation and understanding of a tradition's meaning and contexts.
Folk artists are often unrecorded or unrecognized outside of their immediate communities. The Program encourages organization to identify folk artists through professional field research and document their traditions as part of the development of a project. Applicants are also encouraged to document presentations supported by the Program.
Individuals with professional expertise in the folk arts should be included, where appropriate, in projects for which support is requested. Folklorists and ethnomusicologists provide valuable skills in documentation, program development, interpretation of presentations, and the production of programs for varied audiences.
The Program encourages collaborative initiatives carried out on a regional or statewide basis among folk arts programs.
The Folk Arts Program welcomes new applicants. Applicants are expected to contact Program staff prior to the registration deadline and arrange for a consultation.
Evaluative Criteria
Grant requests in this Program are evaluated in accordance with the relevant agency-wide criteria.
Artistic Evaluation
The Council must be able to evaluate an applicant's artistic quality on an ongoing basis. It is the responsibility of all current and prospective applicants to inform the Program of all relevant arts activities at least four weeks in advance of the event date. This is required so that staff, advisory panelists, or program auditors may attend and evaluate the events.
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Applicant organizations are limited to one grant request to the Folk Arts Program, with the exception of the Folk Arts Apprenticeships category.