Dorsett spraying grape vines a little east of the present West Wing of the USDA. “Pat” is at the pump; Dorsett at the nozzle, ca. 1914. Beverly Thomas Galloway Papers. Special Collections, National Agricultural Library.

May 15, 2012 marks the exact 150th anniversary of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), one of the partners of the Campus and Community:  Public and Land-grant Universities at 150 program of the 2012 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. On this day in 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation that established the USDA.

To read more about this groundbreaking legislation and other facts about the USDA and its 150th anniversary, click here.

Washington, D.C.--the city itself--serves as showcase for thoughtful and provocative public and street art. Here, wheatpasted posters by Steven Cummings provoke questions about identity. Photograph by Susana Raab/Anacostia Community Museum

The Citified program of the upcoming Festival grows out of a long-term Anacostia Community Museum initiative, Call and Response, which explores arts and creativity through exhibitions and installations, museum collections, and community-focused programs.

In developing these programs, I have had the opportunity to meet many talented artists. For instance, working with visionary artists BK Adams and Steven Cummings has been an unforgettable experience. The two are frequent collaborators—working closely together on a number of public art projects. I often found the two cooking up some new idea when I visited BK Adams’ studio.

Steven Cummings is the brilliant conceptual artist behind a series of mysterious 2011-2012 wheatpastings in the  D.C. area.  His images are meant to stimulate a number of provocative questions about identity and representation, and can still be seen in many neighborhoods throughout the city.

BK Adams takes a break in his studio, 2010. Photograph by Susana Raab/Anacostia Community Museum

Mischievous. Fantastical. Eccentric. Mind-blowing. Incredible. Talented. Charmingly weird. Engaging. All of these descriptions and more characterize the art and purpose of BK Adams, otherwise known as bk.iamart.adams, local artist and charismatic figure-about-town. Self-taught, BK is determined to challenge and encourage people–young and old, male and female, conformist and nonconformist–to expand their visual and spiritual horizons, to find the creative expression inside them, and to create their own strong identities in a world that is often confusing, intimidating, and overwhelming.

BK Adams’ “IAMART” motto and works of art have appeared in public places and in galleries throughout Washington, D.C., and have also attracted a broad and devoted following across the country and on the internet. Using exuberant color and everyday life objects, his work poses a call to the viewer to get involved with art. Visiting his studio in historic Anacostia was eye-opening and mind-expanding.

You can meet BK Adams at the Folklife Festival on June 30 and from July 4 through July 8. Adams will be talking about his artistic process and creating a new work of art in the “Good Hope and Naylor Corner” tent.

Portia James is senior curator at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum.

As part of the Campus and Community Festival Program, the UC Davis “Bags Across the Globe” (BAG) project will be creating a large sculpture in the shape of a globe from discarded plastic bags. BAG works to raise international awareness about the environmental threat of plastic shopping bags. It is one of several UC Davis community partnerships designed to reduce waste, produce new revenue streams, and engage people in issues related to environmental stewardship and sustainability.

Rob Schneider, the Festival technical director,  just sent us this photo from the warehouse, where Tyler Nelson is building the frame that will be used to create the plastic bag globe.

Block 05519 is made up of eight separate panels and is devoted solely to Keith Haring.

Today, May 4, artist Keith Haring would have turned fifty-four years old. Haring—a New York-based artist whose drawings, paintings, and public artwork were inspired by New York’s vibrant street-art scene—died of AIDS in 1990. There are over fifteen panels and even an entire block (made up of eight panels) created in tribute to his life and artistry in The AIDS Memorial Quilt.

You can see these panels and blocks by searching the The NAMES Project Foundation Web site. The entire AIDS Memorial Quilt, including the panels for Haring, is coming to Washington, D.C., this summer. Approximately one thousand panels will be on view at the Festival and the rest will be displayed in venues all around the city.

Workshop participants admire a quilt-in-process made of fabric from Nigeria. All photos by and courtesy of Jen Knutzen, McGhee Street Photography

On Saturday, March 3, the Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt program staff and documentation team got a glimpse of what will be happening inside the Quilting Bee tent during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The Women’s Collective  in Washington, D.C., hosted a Call My Name Workshop for a day of sewing quilt panels. The NAMES Project Foundation created this nation-wide series of workshops in response to the disproportionate number of African American quilt panels to the number of African Americans killed by AIDS. Call My Name is an effort to gather African American communities around commemorating their friends and family and creating a better representation of the African American HIV/AIDS population in The AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Tierra, whose grandmother is HIV positive, works with children infected with HIV/AIDS. At the Call My Name workshop she sewed names onto a quilt.

The workshop opened with a libation, a ritual pouring of liquid in memory of those who have transitioned, while their names are said aloud. After speaking a name, the group answered with “ase,” an African word meaning “and so it will be,” as a bestowal of power and authority that the speakers’ blessings be carried forth. Then the quilting began!

A signature square ready for workshop attendees to write messages and sign their names with permanent marker.

Quilt panels, which measure 3′ by 6′, of various designs and stages of completion were splayed on tables with plenty of needles and thread for anyone to sit down and start sewing. Some people brought personal quilts they were making in memory of a close friend or family member who died from AIDS. Other quilters were there to be put to work sewing the letters of names on community panels or a big red ribbon in the center of a panel on which people could write messages and sign their names with a marker. For the less experienced sewers, workshop leader Juanita Williams taught the art and skill of the running stitch as well as reminding everyone that the back of the stitches have to look just as nice as the front.

Juanita Williams talks about quilting and African American representation in The AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Ms. Williams, who will be leading quilting workshops at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, also told us that “glue” is a bad word in quilting. Quilters use stitch witchery to tape down pieces of fabric until they can be sewn on permanently, but they never use glue. “When you hear ‘Oh no’ or ‘glue’ in quilting, you know something’s wrong.”

Quilters also brought out dolls they made from fabric and recycled glass bottles while others passed around beaded African bracelets with “I ♥ U  + or –” in the pattern. The sewing conversations jumped from politics to stories about friends or other quilt panels to hula-hooping to HIV/AIDS education. Although most of these quilts were not finished by the end of the day, the goal is to have them finished and added to The AIDS Memorial Quilt in time for display in Washington, D.C., for the Folklife Festival on June 27–July 1 and July 4–8 and the International AIDS Conference on July 22–27. 

Anna F. Kaplan is the program coordinator for the 2012 Festival program Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt. She has a master’s in Oral History and a master’s in Anthropology from Columbia University.

UC Davis campus looking toward Student Union. Campus organizations advertise their events on "sandwich boards." This seems like a great idea for the Festival site!

The 2012 Campus and Community: 150 Years of Public and Land-grant Universities and the USDA Festival program includes partnerships with, to date, about 20 universities and various parts of the USDA.  Unfortunately, our Festival team will only get to visit some of the universities given our time frame.  On a recent personal trip to California in late January, I had the privilege of visiting the University of California, Davis. 

It was a pleasure to be on a university campus again. So much positive energy, with all those young people zipping around on foot and on bicycles, handsome buildings new and old, and beautiful landscaping and gardens! It hardly mattered that the weather was in the 40s and wet. 

The staff involved in planning the UC Davis Festival participation, including folklorist and Dean Patricia Turner and her excellent assistant Sharon Knox, had planned a schedule chock full of meetings; visits to classes, laboratories, and studios; and a glimpse of numerous green spaces on campus.

The first stop after a tasty lunch at the Student Union was Dr. Ann Savageau’s class on Sustainable Design.  Afterwards, Dr. Savageau took me to the design studio to meet with students involved in the BAG project, which raises awareness of sustainability issues by creating beautiful and sturdy reusable bags from materials ranging from upholsterer’s samples to vinyl event markers. The studio was bustling with students drawing, draping fabrics on dress forms, and sorting fabrics for other projects. We also visited the Aggie Restore Shop, a student-driven and cleverly designed second-hand store offering everything from “gently used” clothing to class supplies at great prices.

A drive around the sprawling campus with Associate Dean Diane Ullman revealed such wonders as the West Campus, a sustainable village unto itself which endeavors to achieve a zero carbon footprint in the coming years; the Peter J. Shields Oak Grove with over 80 varieties of these stately trees; and the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven with pollinator friendly plants, educational signage, and whimsical artwork. 

The next day, after more meetings, Pat Turner and I visited the ultra modern Robert Mondavi Institute for Food Wine and Food Science. First stop, the office of Dr. Charles Bamforth, considered by many beer makers to be a major deity. Dr. Bamforth (who seems much more like just “Charlie” by his modest and friendly demeanor) is one of the foremost experts on beer in the world. We visited the test brewery, and I peppered him with stupid questions about beer making–but from his patience and good humor I could tell he had been asked worse questions.  (At least I knew what hops are, because since we featured Kent County, England, as part of the 2007 Roots of Virginia Culture Festival program, I have had some growing in my garden.)

Last but not least, an olive oil tasting at UC Davis Olive Center with assistant director Nicole Stursenberger. No, not all olive oils are created equal, and some of those produced in California, including at the Olive Center, are among the best in the country. Nicole schooled us on the proper way to sample the three oils offered to us, and we learned, among other things, that olive oil can have a bitter kick to it that hits you right in the back of the throat! 

It was a great visit, thanks to Pat, Sharon, and the team helping to organize the participation in the Campus and Community program by UC Davis. 

Click on images to enlarge and view captions.  All photographs by Betty J. Belanus, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution

Betty Belanus is the curator for the 2012 Festival program Campus and Community: 150 Years of Public and Land-grant Universities and the USDA. She has curated many Smithsonian Folklife Festival programs including Massachusetts (1988), Family Farms in the Heartland (1991), Working at the Smithsonian (1996), African Immigrants to Metropolitan D.C. (1997), New Hampshire (1999), Water Ways: Mid-Atlantic Maritime Communities (2004), The Roots of Virginia Culture (2007), and Wales Smithsonian Cymru (2009).

Catalina Gómez and Leonor Palacios, palm fiber artisan (Chocó, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Catalina Gómez

This July I had the privilege to serve as an interpreter and presenter at the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program Colombia: La Naturaleza de la Cultura. It was an incredible experience for me as a Colombian living abroad. What an absolute gift it was to inundate myself with the beautiful energy and the richness of my culture and to have had the opportunity to translate and transmit the knowledge and traditions of my home country to an English-speaking audience in Washington, D.C.

I was born and raised in Colombia, but I left the country twelve years ago. I currently reside in D.C. During the Festival, it was as if a miniature version of my country had traveled and installed itself on the National Mall; I couldn’t believe it! All of a sudden, I was in the city where I live, but I was also in Colombia. What’s more, the exhibitions not only transported me to my native city Bogotá, but to all of Colombia: I was in the highlands; I was in the wet forest of the Pacific; I was in the Amazon; I was in the Llanos… I was suddenly immersed in the geographical and cultural diversity of my country and absorbing it in a very intense way from the true bearers of the traditions and culture who had travelled to the Festival to share their knowledge.

The ‘ecosystem’ that I worked in as an interpreter was the Pacific rainforest, the Chocó region. Before and during the Festival, I went through the process of absorbing and learning about the cultural practices of this region through my own research and by reading the material that the Smithsonian and the Fundación Erigaie in Colombia had produced as preparation for the Festival; but more importantly through active conversations with the participants who came to Washington to teach us about la cultura chocoana (the cultural practices from Chocó). I spent most of my time with the cantadoras de alabaos (singers of alabaos, which are songs sang a cappella during funerals). I served as interpreter during the demonstrations of the balasadas, which are river processions that honor the patron saints of the Chocó, San Francisco and San Antonio. I also helped with other presentations showcasing Pacific ecosystem artists, including those of woodworkers, artisans who create products from palm fiber, and cooks who demonstrated such regional specialities as the “arroz claváo.”

As an interpreter, I was constantly learning, absorbing, observing, listening, and simultaneously translating, transmitting this information to the public. It was intense, it was challenging, but it was incredibly rewarding. One of my most important realizations during the Festival was how the “off-stage” moments could become key experiences of rich cultural connection and dialogue.  Some of the strongest and truly engaging moments happened in the “in-betweens” before and after formal performances.

Here’s a descriptions of one of these off-stage moments:

Toward the last days of the Festival, I was resting with Cruz Neyla, one of the funeral singers, after a performance. She had come from Andagoya, Chocó, to perform what she frequently practices in her village during the funerals of family and community members. We were sitting by the empty coffin that was part of the performative demonstrations of the alabaos and the gualíes, which took place twice a day. She began to tell me about how she sang an alabao to her mother the night of her passing. Her expression tightened, and I could tell that this had occurred recently and that she still held a lot of pain and was grieving. I realized at that moment that we were talking about a specific practice in her local culture—the singing of the alabao— but also about something entirely universal, the grief of losing a loved one.

A minute later, a Festival visitor approached us with her young son. She was drawn by the presence of the coffin and of this unusual setting, and she asked us what this space was all about. After we described the regional funeral traditions for her, she asked Cruz Neyla if she could sing a little to her and Cruz Neyla gladly agreed.

Cruz Neyla began to sing in a way that I hadn’t seen during previous alabao presentations for the public. I knew she was singing to her mother. She was singing with her eyes closed and in the middle of the song she stopped; she couldn’t continue. She began to cry. The visitor’s eyes began to water as well, and she told me that her father had just passed away. Cruz Neyla looked at her and told her that she had also recently lost her mother and that she was singing to her. They looked at each other, and I knew that they were connecting without  speaking. I translated to each of them what the other was saying but at that moment I knew that translation wasn’t necessary. These two women were communicating in such a genuine and profound way, they were completely connected at that instant by the grief and the beauty of that song that Cruz Neyla sang to her deceased mother. I feel that this moment was a perfect example of how cultural expression and traditions can truly be external and localized manifestations of universal realities of the human condition.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival achieves, in my opinion, an ideal form of showcasing traditional cultures. The participation of cultural bearers opens up the space for spontaneous and pure expressions of culture. The participants understand that their customs are considered valuable, and so during the Festival they feel proud, and they take this pedagogical exchange extremely seriously. During the ten days of the Festival, I witnessed many meaningful and genuine cultural exchanges. These encounters inspired new questions. And for a brief span of time, new means of connecting arose among all those who interacted. For me, the experience of participating in these exchanges was absolutely unforgettable.

Click on images to enlarge and view captions.

Catalina Gómez was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she works as a program assistant in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. She earned her bachelor’s degree in visual arts and Latin American literature from the University of California, San Diego; and she holds a master’s degree in visual culture from the University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain). She has a strong passion for literature, cultural studies, and the arts –she also works independently as an illustrator.

Hermes Romero from the Southeastern Plains makes a key chain for Jhon Jairo "Guama" Amortegui, a yipero (jeep driver) from the Coffee region.

In early December, Cristina Díaz-Carrera and I eagerly travelled to Bogotá to witness and enjoy the re-staging of the Colombia: The Nature of Culture 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, which formed part of the renown Expo Artesanías Fair held annually at the Corferias Exposition Center. In our earlier conversations with the Ministry of Culture, Minister Mariana Garcés Córdoba reiterated the importance of bringing the Festival program back home, and five months later, the journey through six ecosystems and the major metropolitan cities of Colombia happened again. The Colombia research, design, and logistics teams, with the assistance of a small team of guadua builders who had worked on the program in Washington, D.C., re-mounted in less than two weeks the organically delicate hojamanta tents made of guadua bamboo elegantly joined with steel fittings, which housed the program at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Adapted to the industrial setting of the Corferias pavilion, the Colombian public could now experience the cultural journey featured in Washington through the many less familiar regional communities in their own country.

As we entered the exhibition, we were welcomed by a new sign explaining that Colombia had been the guest country at the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It continued to describe how the program became a truly collective ambassador for national culture.* The sign continued, “The exhibition offers a different reading of the country and its culture while providing a deeper understanding of its crafts by presenting knowledge and practices in context and in relation to the environment and its resources.”**

The team wisely replaced the signs damaged on the return trip with full-blown images of the participants performing and demonstrating their skills in Washington, providing a seamless link with the Festival. Over eighty of the 100 participants were able to participate in the exhibition in Bogotá. To replace musicians and artisans who were unable to come, individuals documented during the research phase, or who were part of the family or community of the original participants, were invited. Thus, the number of “collective ambassadors for national culture” continues to grow.

It was very moving for Cristina and me to be reunited with the participants, who welcomed us with open arms. Even though hojamanta tents, sign panels, and installation components helped replicate the presentation at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the event setting and public were different. This time, the participants were seasoned presenters and readily took ownership over the exhibition. Their main challenge was to engage the public face-to-face, as they had so successfully done in Washington. In Bogotá, the general public is accustomed to coming to the Expo Artesanías Fair to shop. The other pavilions offered ethnic and traditional crafts, housewares, jewelry, and much more, but when they arrived at the Colombia: The Nature of Culture pavilion, they were met by the ambassadors of culture who engaged them in conversations about their crafts and practices, about their materials, about their region, and about the value of their traditions. It was wonderful to see the friendships that had initially developed in Washington among participants who shared similar traditions as well as those from different ecosystems flourish in the home exhibition, enriching the exchanges.

I asked some of the participants for their impressions of their experience at the Festival in Washington. Two major themes emerged. First, for many, the Folklife Festival had provided them a unique opportunity to learn about the wide diversity of cultures in their own country and, more importantly, to make friends with people from other regions. In fact, they all agreed that they had formed a new family, a family that they could count on at any time. Already they have been advising each other on workshop and marketing strategies. Secondly, they felt that their way of life, their work, and their traditions had been validated by a broad public, but more importantly, that they were recognized as valuable to their own country.

Earlier in the month, a smaller sampling of the Festival was featured in Medellín, and perhaps in the future, the program, or parts of the program, may travel to the different ecosystems that were featured.

Click on images to enlarge and view captions.

*”Este evento se constituyó en una verdadera embajada colectiva de la cultura national”.

** “Ofrece una lectura diferente del país y su cultura a la vez que profundiza el concepto de lo artesanal mediante la presentación de los saberes y oficios en sus contextos y en su estrecha relación con su medio natural y sus recursos”.

Olivia Cadaval curated the 2011 Colombia: The Nature of Culture Festival program. She is curator and chair of the Cultural Research and Education group at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

Kiley Guyton Acosta in front of the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Colombia program sign and the Washington Monument.

After having seen, heard, touched, tasted, talked, felt, danced, lived and breathed the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival for two weeks, it is nearly impossible to articulate in words how profoundly this unique event has impacted me. Through my eyes, our program Colombia: The Nature of Culture not only generated a cultural conversation between the marvelous Colombian participants and the public, but it became the forum for an extraordinary trans-national, intra-cultural exchange yielding countless connections and discoveries, where valuable new discourses took root outside the theoretical confines of academia among people of all walks of life, right on the National Mall in the sweltering summer heat and humidity of Washington DC.

The experience of working as a presenter for the musical group Chirimía la Contundencia as well as artisans and tradition-bearers of the Pacific Rainforest ecosystem was both challenging and inspiring. The velocity of the spontaneous exchanges between the participants and the public kept me on my toes. I quickly realized that in my capacity as translator and cultural interpreter, I had to listen well and remain totally present in all aspects of the interaction in order to maintain the authenticity and integrity of the individual voices of the participants, while also ensuring that commentary from the public was accurately communicated. My brain felt inundated and exhausted from the intense dialogues and Spanish-English translations during the first two days of the festival, but by the end of week one, facilitating had become second nature as I was energized by the constant activity.

Like my fellow presenters, I witnessed fascinating interchanges as a cultural intermediary. Consequently, the Folklife Festival has inspired me to reflect on the tremendous significance of valorizing past and contemporary cultural production in myriad forms. After observing these dynamics in a real-time interactive setting, I have come to understand cultural production as vital to the preservation of tradition and identity. Moreover, I have gained newfound insight into the potential cultural products hold to unite globally dispersed populations through mutual understanding and appreciation. Examples from the festival provided me with tangible points of reference as I continue to contemplate organizer and writer Suzanne Pharr’s  idea that “it is through the creation of art and culture that the spirit is fed and kept alive and our common humanity is expressed and exposed.”

Click on images to enlarge and view captions.

I loved looking out from my corner of the Al son que me toquen stage at the packed dance floor, where every day exuberant crowds danced in unison to Zully and Leonor’s choreographies, enlivened by the contagious rhythms of La Contundencia. My enjoyment culminated in the band’s impromptu collaboration with the R&B group The Monitors on the last day of the festival. With Dan Sheehey effortlessly facilitating the unrehearsed workshop-style performance in Spanish and English, these musicians shared their instruments and listened attentively to one another as a novel musical sound was born. The natural fusion delighted the audience, moving everyone out of their seats. I felt proud and honored to share in a moment that truly illustrated the universal language of music. Rare are these instances in life when we experience pure joy collectively, among total strangers.

I also found it remarkable how Xiomara’s traditional hair-braiding demonstration drew interest and admiration from an incredibly diverse public, many of them familiar with similar hairstyling and cornrowing techniques despite geographic, cultural and linguistic disparities. For nearly three hours, I watched festival goers watch Xiomara as she methodically reproduced her award-winning design La chirimía chocoana; a hairstyle inspired by the traditional chirimía band of El Choco that featured braided sculptures of the five major musical wind and percussion instruments. In particular, African-American women in the audience nodded their heads in agreement and understanding as Xiomara answered a constant flow of questions about her hair-braiding process and the materials she uses. The familiarity of her craft fostered a sense of camaraderie that traversed linguistic borders, and by the end of the demonstration several observers had personally invited Xiomara to visit renowned local hair-braiding salons in the D.C. area to exchange styling techniques and ideas. I recognized many of the same faces days later at her second staged demonstration, and by the end of the festival she had gained a fan base!

Click on images to enlarge and view captions.

The encounter between the alabao singers from El Choco and the Peace Corps program’s Garifuna participants from Guatemala and Honduras represented another exceptional moment that exemplifies Pharr’s idea. When the Garifuna women saw the alabao performance area set up to emulate a traditional wake in the home with decorative sheets, an altar, a coffin with candles on both sides and images of the saints, they recognized the set-up as nearly identical to their own practices in their respective communities. They spoke of similarities with respect to funeral rites, festivities and the Catholic tradition of the novena. One visitor observing the interaction commented that the haunting alabaos, sung a capella, were reminiscent of African-American Negro spirituals and certain gospel songs she sings at her church. Cruz Neyla and Fulvia responded that the alabao postures and vocal expressions are rooted in Africa and that for African slaves in Colombia, song was the medium through which they expressed deep sorrow, pain, loss and joy. It was all they had. The matriarch of the Garifuna collective added that irrespective of nationality, people of African descent share a cultural and historic legacy that continues to inflect contemporary marginalization in Latin America and the United States. Therefore we must use culture and art as a means of preserving oral tradition, combating discrimination and instilling youth with positive conceptualizations of black identity.

Later that afternoon, I thought deeply about how similar folkways and shared African diasporic ancestry had bridged geographic divides among these women so that the chocoanas  and the Garifuna immediately interacted like family, albeit at a formally arranged meeting in a prescribed setting. Yet the natural exchange that took place felt epic and extraordinary. It dawned on me that never before had I participated in a conversation of this nature outside the walls of academia, nor had I ever talked among South American, Central American and North American women exclusively about the historic denigration of Afro-descended populations throughout the Americas. Under different circumstances, this discussion might have been uncomfortable, or it might never have taken place.  However on that day, everyone conversed freely and appeared to derive solidarity from discussing how identity and pride might be re-inscribed through cultural expression.

The festival’s talented participants moved me in many ways, but one particular experience will remain forever etched in my memory. Late one afternoon, a visitor and her young son approached the altar area in the Pacific ecosystem. The area was nearly deserted as the other participants were involved in presentations elsewhere and only Cruz Neyla and I remained. The visitor inquired about traditional funeral rites in El Choco, and although she was exhausted and hoarse from singing all day, Cruz Neyla obliged the woman and her little boy by quietly singing an alabao.  I had heard a full repertoire of alabaos by that point of the festival and was already familiar with many of the lyrics and melodies. However, performing alone now, with only the three of us huddled in a semicircle around her, Cruz Neyla quietly sang one simple, melancholy refrain of an alabao that was unfamiliar to me. She then stopped abruptly and did not continue. Suddenly I felt a knot in my throat rise and swell as a wave of emotion swept over me and I became inundated in profound sorrow. For the first time in my life I began to cry, inexplicably, and despite my shock and confusion I could not stop crying for a long time thereafter. I noticed that Cruz Neyla’s eyes also glistened, and both the woman and her son wiped tears away. All I could manage to utter was “That was such a sad song.” “I know,” whispered Cruz Neyla. “That’s why I don’t like to sing it.” Later, she explained to me that her mama had passed on only months earlier, and this was the alabao she sang as she held her dying mother in her arms. I doubt I’ll ever manage to fully convey what I felt as she sang that day, softly, heartbreakingly, but with conviction. I was still unaware of the personal significance the lyrics held for her, but through those verses Cruz Neyla transmitted her grief so acutely that it felt like my own in that instant. I once heard that the potency of artistic expression is measured by the ability of the artist to successfully provoke his or her own personal emotional state in the spectator through the creative medium. The poignancy of being moved to tears by some indescribable quality of her expression and tone helped me grasp the transcendental power of tradition bearers such as Cruz Neyla. They command their craft as true artists and play a vital role in communicating the spectrum of human emotions, thereby maintaining the social and spiritual wellbeing of their communities.

I began the Folklife Festival with the expectation that through our program, visitors would learn about Colombia’s rich cultural heritage and appreciate how culture interacts with the natural environment. In the end, I understood the outcome of this event as far more complex and multi-dimensional. Through meaningful interactions and sensorial learning experiences, the festival presented Colombia in a way that allowed us all to see aspects of ourselves in others, and vice versa. In other words, it encouraged everyone to focus on our common humanity as opposed to national differences, thus promoting cultural continuity across time and space and creating manifold, far-reaching possibilities for global communities to come together, and for lifelong friendships to develop.

Click on images to enlarge and view captions.

Kiley Guyton Acosta is a doctoral candidate in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature at the University of New Mexico with concentrations in Afro-Cuban and Dominican Diaspora women’s writing. An advocate of local and trans-national cultural arts programs, she seeks novel and innovative ways of integrating scholarship, teaching and activism to explore cultural products as vital resources for preserving cultural heritage and exploring identity. Kiley was a member of the curatorial team for the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’ s Colombia program and also works as a liaison for the Afro-Latino Archives Project.

On Dec 7, 2011, Folklife Center staff Olivia Cadaval and Cristina Díaz-Carrera travelled to Bogotá, Colombia, to attend the first three days of the restaging of the Colombia: The Nature of Culture program.

This reiteration of last summer’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival program was presented at Bogotá’s annual Expo Artesanías. It featured 80 of the 100 original participants, the guadua tents (or hojamantas), and the graphic panels and signage.

Program coordinator Diaz-Carrera reports, “It was a wonderful experience to observe the ongoing impact of the Festival and to continue strengthening our relationships with our partners.”

Slide cursor over images to see captions.