Week 1
For the 1st week of the practicum with the Oregon Folklife Network, Maya and I met with Emily and Riki to discuss the project and scheduling. We decided to meet on Mondays at 11:15am (with the exception of the next two weeks) for check-ins. We were orientated to TAAP (Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program) as this will be our main source for creating posts. We discussed possible issues with using the TAAP archives: determining if the artist was a nominee or awarded, finding the location of the artist and whether the artists is still active. We then set up a meeting with Nathan Georgitis to show us the Oregon Folklore Program archives. We met with him on Monday, Jan. 14th and he orientated us with various resources that we could use to find rural folk artists: the Folk Art of the Oregon Country survey, student folklore fieldwork database, and the TAAP inventory held in Special Collections. The TAAP inventory has not been digitized yet, so Maya and I will have to access the files at Special Collections. Nathan has provided us with an inventory and/or box numbers that we will check out at Special Collections. Once we have identified the artist we want to use, we will contact Nathan who will help us find images. Maya and I also registered with Special Collections on Monday. We are setting up a meeting on Friday to discuss when we will go to Special Collections and look through the files.
I also read over some materials provided to me in the practicum packet, which gave me an introduction to folklife and folklore, and I reviewed The Art of the Rural website and Rural Arts & Culture Map. This was great information for me because I had very little understanding of what folklife/lore was before signing up for this practicum. After looking over the various websites, I realize that the definition of folklife, art and culture is very broad and often differing. One site listed 4 definitions: 1) oral narration, rituals, crafts and other forms of vernacular expressive culture 2) the academic discipline studying the before-mentioned 3) everyday usage; folkloric phenomena (such as music) 4) myth or falsehood. However, OFN’s definition is much more specific: everyday knowledge, art and lore that are passed within communities through imitation, conversation and practice. The OFN website also states that folklife is not art that is folk-inspired or produced by individuals or groups not a part of the original community who developed the art or practice. This is very helpful information for creating posts to the Rural & Arts Culture Map on behalf of OFN. I want to make sure the artists we pick reflect OFN’s values as well as The Art of Rural’s mission to focus on rural-urban exchange. Thus, I believe it would be best to collect data just on TAAP awarded artists as those artists are already approved by OFN. Hopefully, we will be able to find living, working artists through these archives who live in rural areas.