NEA Funding for OFN—Willamette Valley Folklife Survey, Spring 2018!

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded the Oregon Folklife Network funding to conduct folklife field surveys and documentation of traditions in the Willamette Valley. We are pleased to announce that folklorists Amy Howard, Alina Mansfield, and Thomas Richardson will be conducting this fieldwork with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and in the counties of Polk and Benton as well as the portions of Marion, Linn, and Lane counties in the Willamette Valley.

OFN, Oregon’s Folk & Traditional Arts Program, is in search of excellent folk artists and culture keepers. We’ll include the best of those documented in our Culture Keepers Roster, an online curated resource for local festivals, parks, school, and library programs looking to hire performers, demonstrators, and speakers. We are also looking for master artists to serve as mentors for the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program.

OFN will be working with a range of cultural partners such as Lane Arts Council, Lane County Historical Museum, Salem Arts Association, Corvallis Arts Center, County Cultural Coalitions, Independence Heritage Museum, da Vinci Days, Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center, CAPACES Leadership Institute (Latino workers), and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and our operational partners (Oregon Historical Society, Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Cultural Trust). We’ll be partnering with some of those organizations to create public programs with traditional artists in the region.

Please put us in touch with the traditional musicians, dancers, quilters, embroiderers, storytellers, fly-tiers, cooks, artisans, and others in your part of the Willamette Valley. We very much want to hear from the range of the region’s communities— regional, ethnic, and occupational folklore, including but not limited to Asian and Pacific Islanders (Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Hawai’ian, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Vietnamese), Latino (Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican), Native American (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde), and European (Dutch, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Scotch-Irish, Scottish, Swedish) as well as logging, hunting, railroad, sheep and dairy farming, orchards, viticulture, brewing, hops growing, fishing and fishing guides, boat building and other waterways traditions along with foodways, music, storytelling, and other relevant traditional expressions.

Contact information for Project folklorists:

OFN preserves this documentation at the University of Oregon, Special Collections and University Archives.

To provide OFN with contact information for tradition keepers, contact Riki Saltzman, riki@uoregon.edu; Alina Mansfield, alinam@uoregon.edu; or phone 541-346-3820.

OFN is a University of Oregon administered program with operational support from the Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Historical Society, and Oregon Cultural Trust.

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