What is Folklife?
Folklife as a discipline is concerned with the art of everyday life; the ways in which we creatively communicate through our daily activities. This can include dance, music, fashion, food, storytelling, decoration, crafts, and rituals. Folklife practices are often passed down from generation to generation, maintained and innovated, learned informally, and through face-to-face interaction. Look around you and you’ll probably find that your life is filled with folklife.
Community is at the heart of folklife and folk arts. Folklife is community knowledge given aesthetic shape. It is deeply tied to the shared meanings, customs, values, beliefs, and rituals of a group. It represents an important grassroots dimension of the cultural sector and is often tied to ideas of place and identity.
What Does Folklife Look Like on Staten Island?
Staten Island is home to so many different communities, families, and individuals that to try to succinctly define the cultural traditions of the island’s inhabitants would be nearly impossible. Folklife on Staten Island could be a mother teaching her children to make her mother’s meatballs, or when friends gather to tell Liberian Anansi stories over coffee, or when Mixtec Carnaval rituals are practiced and performed at a yearly festival, or when freestyling rapping takes place at a Hip Hop cypher, or when musicians play together on traditional Sri Lankan drums, or when marine workers carry on occupational traditions that preserve one of the city’s last working waterfronts.
What Does SIA Folklife Do?
Staten Island Arts Folklife was started in the mid-1990s to spotlight and support the vast array of cultural traditions present on Staten Island. The majority of our programming has focused on presenting, supporting and celebrating the cultural heritage of immigrant communities, both new and old.
We are dedicated to creating programs that arise from the needs of the community groups we work with. These programs are based on extensive fieldwork, relationship-building, and fostering a collaborative curation process.
Our Folklore Friends
City Lore, Center For Traditional Music and Dance, Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts, New York Folklore Society, The American Folklore Society, The American Folklife Center.
Get in Touch
Please contact us for more information on how we may be able to serve you, as a traditional artist, or your community through folk arts programming, documentation, or technical assistance. To make an appointment, please email us at folklife@statenislandarts.org or call us at (718) 447-3329 ext. 1005.
SIA Folklife programming and services are made possible by the generous support of New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council, the New York Folklore Society, the Lois & Richard Nicotra Foundation, Investors Bank Foundation, and our community partner organizations.