Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

PREFACE

C. KURT DEWHURST

AND

MARSHA MACDOWELL

This volume of essays, written from the perspective of program curators at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, offers a window into the theory and practice of curatorial work. The essayists’ personal experiences and reflective analyses describe the history and evolving nature of curation in this specific festival context. The essays also provide an opportunity to examine Festival curatorial practices in the broader intellectual history and evolution of museum practice.

As authors of this preface, we should state that we have been engaged in various roles with the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH). We were fieldworkers, curatorial advisors, presenters, and guest curators. We were responsible for one of the first restagings of a Smithsonian Festival program back in its community, and one of us served for a decade as a member and chair of the CFCH Advisory Council. We have curated exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. At our home institution at Michigan State University, we are both professors who teach museum studies, have published on museums and community engagement, and with many collaborators have developed numerous local, national, and international festival programs and exhibitions (Dewhurst and MacDowell 2013, 265–90; 1999, 7–10; Dewhurst et al. 2008).

Shifting Roles of Museums in Society: Changing Roles of Curators

Because this volume is devoted to conversations about curation of Festival programs at the Smithsonian Institution, it is helpful first to consider the broader meaning of curation within museums and the changing nature of museums in society. In the Western European context, in which the concept of most modern-day museums developed, the historical role of the museum was primarily that of a steward of collections for use by scholars or for the enjoyment of economically elite segments of society. A curator was the person on staff with the responsibility for the intellectual development, care, and use of the museum’s collections. The curators held institutional power and shaped the intellectual stature and integrity of the museum. Curators built reputations for their museums and helped sustain the museums’ professional standing. Museum studies scholars Jane R. Glaser and Artemis A. Zenetou describe the historical and traditional role of curators this way:

Years ago the curator was known as the keeper, the person in charge of the collections of the museum, the keeper of the holdings of a particular museum. Today, though called curators, they are still keepers and caretakers of collections. But their responsibilities go far beyond caretaking, as they do extensive research, write both scholarly and popular monographs and books, compose the scenarios and select the objects for exhibitions, and work closely with other staff. They are often the major subject-matter expert in a discipline in the museum. Thus, they have an important responsibility in keeping the museum on track toward its goals and objectives. (2013, 80)

Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the roles and responsibilities of curators are undergoing changes just as their own institutions are changing. Today, museums that meet professional standards are those that serve multiple audiences, are centers of education and civic engagement, use their resources (collections, facilities, and staff expertise) to address local and global issues, and have collections and programs developed in partnership with communities, including those previously unexamined or ignored.

This expectation for contemporary museums to engage with their communities reflects a broader and increasing societal pressure for cultural and educational institutions to share authority, and to use the power and resources of the institution for common good. Reciprocity, mutuality, and the co-creation of knowledge have become key to the formation and evaluation of programs. Institutions of higher education, especially those founded as public institutions, are especially called upon to address the needs of the local and the other 90%.¹

Museum historian Gail Anderson sees these modern-day public and professional expectations of museums as having a radical impact on the role and the structure of museums: The last century of self-examination—reinventing the museum—symbolizes the general movement of dismantling the museum as an ivory tower of exclusivity and toward the construction of a more socially responsive cultural institution in service to the public (2004, 1). In their reinvention and drive to become more responsive, museums have been undergoing infrastructural changes—a necessity, as museum studies scholar Serena Iervolino notes:

When museums seek to promote intercultural dialogue, it is necessary that the outcomes of single intercultural activities are built into the museum’s institutional fabric in order to sustain a transition from a sporadic engagement with intercultural dialogue to a long-term commitment. In doing so, museums may concretely become sharing spaces for intercultural dialogue, that is, institutions in the public sphere where people of different backgrounds can gather and mediate their differences. In this way museums may succeed in actively contributing to more peaceful societies. (2013, 126)

The audience fans out across the Mall for a performance on this stage positioned in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History at the 1971 Festival. Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Institution.

Engagement with communities takes many forms and strategies, and may engender both positive and negative outcomes. Museum critic Bryony Onciul points out,

Current museology presents community engagement as a positive, mutually beneficial way to improve and democratize representation. However, analyzing participation in practice reveals many forms of engagement, each with different advantages and challenges, none of which solve the problems associated with representing complex, multifaceted communities. Despite the positive assumptions, engagement has the potential to be both beneficial and detrimental. (2013, 79)

While sometimes those transitions are smooth, they often are contested within the profession or by the communities the museums serve. Ivan Karp and Corrine A. Kratz term these tensions museum frictions.

The range of museum roles, definitions, and cross-institutional relations entails conjunctions of disparate constituencies, interests, goals, and perspectives. The conjunctions produce debates, tensions, collaborations, contests, and conflicts of many sorts, and at many levels—museum frictions that have both positive and negative outcomes. (2006, 2)

It should be noted that the term community has multiple meanings and that problems sometimes arise because of different understandings of what constitutes community. As Onciul has pointed out, It must be remembered that when speaking of museum community engagement, it is neither the museum nor the community that is engaged, but individuals from each camp who come together to represent their source bodies and negotiate engagement (2013, 81). Best practice today for effective museum and community engagement incorporates a commitment by both to mutuality, reciprocity, transparency, equity, and constant communication.

Museum studies scholar Viv Golding, for instance, points out that in this critical discourse curators have been accused of dumbing down complex concerns, being inattentive to the needs of diverse audiences, or acting inappropriately as social workers preoccupied with social concerns they are ill equipped to address at the expense of their core duties of collection care and research (2013, 25). Even within ecomuseums, a relatively new type of museum that is more connected to and responsive to community needs, the curatorial role has resulted in friction, as historian Dominique Poulot points out:

A new class of curators has appeared, at times provoking spectacular controversies; the phenomenon is limited, to be sure, but heralds a fundamental shift in the profession. The new curators, even as they accept the logic of the private or associated museum, which placed them in a role comparable to that of the entrepreneur in civil society, are above all concerned with promoting the self-discovery and developments of the community. (1994, 75)

In the conversations in this volume, Smithsonian Folklife Festival program curators reflect on how they have engaged individuals and communities in telling their own stories, how they foster learning by participants and visitors, positively impact the communities, and advance changes in museum-based curatorial work.

Curation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Take the instruments out of their cases and let them sing.

—S. Dillon Ripley²

Museum exhibitions and festival programs have both similarities and differences; both are now understood as tools to engage communities in learning. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has been an important laboratory for experimental curatorial practice and for formulating museum curatorial work with deeper community engagement. Richard Kurin, current Smithsonian under secretary and former CFCH director, describes the origins of the Festival:

The Festival developed under first director Ralph Rinzler with strong support from Secretary S. Dillon Ripley. The Festival was part of a larger effort by Ripley in the 1960s to make the National Mall more accessible to the American public and make the Smithsonian’s programs more exciting and engaging. He believed that citizens should feel a sense of ownership and identification with the national patrimony, represented by the national treasures kept by the Smithsonian. . . . Ripley wanted visitors to seek out museums, not be put off by them. He wanted people to feel welcome on the Mall and view it as America’s front lawn. He also believed that museums had to do more to engage the public, that their artifacts had to be reunited with the people who made and used them. The Festival was a good way to do this. (1998, 8)

The Festival, one of the Smithsonian’s signature programs, could not be situated in a place that has more potential to engage thousands in seeing and learning about cultural traditions. Located in the heart of the nation’s capital and surrounded by the other museums of the Smithsonian, this annual two-week pop-up museum has served as an open-air, freely accessible public showcase for not only the traditions presented, but also for how those traditions can be presented. In the informal, self-directed learning environment that the Festival provides, visitors are introduced to producers of culture presented in contextualized settings. In some ways, the Festival has reflected and incorporated innovations championed by the open-air museum movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the living history museums and ecomuseums of the latter twentieth century. Other influences include the more recent emphasis on museums being visitor-centered, as well as ethnic and racially specific museums, the participatory museum, inclusive museum, and sites of conscience museum movements.³ All of the more recent advocate for museums that share authority with the communities they serve and with other experts not based at museums. This trend towards more engagement became even more heightened with the advent of the Internet (Adair et al. 2011).

Wa:k Tab Basket Dancers (Tohono O’odham) from San Xavier district in Arizona present on one of the stages of the Carriers of Culture: Living Native Basket Traditions program at the 2006 Festival. Photo by Daniel Dean, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Institution.

At the Festival, curators and organizers have innovated or advanced approaches to interpretive and presentational practice that present models for incorporation into more traditional museum and other settings. As folklorist, museum specialist, and former member of the CFCH Advisory Council Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is considered exemplary and has set a high standard for the presentation of tangible and intangible heritage, to use UNESCO language, within the limitations of the festival as a metacultural form (2006, 179).

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s comment about the Festival setting a standard alludes to the important and sometimes understudied or critiqued ways in which the Festival has served as a testing platform and then model for cultural presentation; has created resources that benefit expected and unexpected outcomes; and has played an advocacy role—especially in the context of the nation’s capital—in advancing human rights, social and economic justice, citizenship, inclusive society, and cross-cultural understanding. Festival curation is a process intended to result in a product—a Festival program—but it sometimes has other, lasting results that become measures of success of the curation.

Insights from Critical Curatorial Discourse

Lawrence M. Small, former secretary of the Smithsonian, once called the Festival a party that scholarship gives (2002). Scholarship has informed the construction of the Festival, and the curatorial conversations presented in this volume add to the larger critical discourse about curators. The curatorial conversations here reveal how Festival curators have embedded deep collaboration into the development of their programs and how they have been creative in tapping various dimensions of individuals to showcase their art and their life experiences. The essays also reveal how the success of effectively curated programs is dependent on more than the work of the staff-based curator; it also depends on the expertise and skills of other specialists (i.e., educators, graphic designers, set designers, sound engineers), as well as the non-staff curators and advisors from the academy and from the community (Duclos-Orsello 2013). Finally, the essays suggest arenas for more scholarship on festival evaluation and programmatic experimentation.

The curatorial conversations here should—and will—expand the dialogue about curatorial practice not only within this particular Festival and museum, but within the broader world of museums, festivals, and other cultural heritage associations striving to be relevant and responsive to the audiences they serve.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Imagining America, a consortium of universities and organizations dedicated to advancing knowledge and creativity through publicly engaged scholarship that draws on humanities, arts, and design. We catalyze change in campus practices, structures, and policies that enables publicly engaged artists and scholars to thrive and contribute to community action and revitalization. Imagining America. http://imaginingamerica.org/ (accessed May 15, 2014).

2. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian, quotation from 1996. In Richard Kurin, Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Culture Of, By, and For the People (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 8.

3. An ecomuseum is a museum focused on the identity of a place, largely based on local participation and aiming to enhance the welfare and development of local communities. Wikipedia, Ecomuseum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecomuseum (accessed May 28, 2014). For an extended discussion of the evolution of the ecomuseum movement, see Peter Davis, Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, 2nd edition (London: Leicester University Press, 2011).

The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is a growing network that operates with the following mission: We are sites, individuals, and initiatives activating the power of places of memory to engage the public in connecting past and present in order to envision and shape a more just and humane future. http://www.sitesofconscience.org/ (accessed May 28, 2014). For seminal work on the participatory museum, see Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010).

PROLOGUE

Mediating and Immediating at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

ROBERT BARON

The stars aligned for Ralph Rinzler in 1967 when he created the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, an event that would transform how traditions are represented by cultural specialists. Dissatisfied with decontextualized festivals of the folk music revival, committed to presenting material culture alongside music and dance and developing strategies to safeguard folk traditions no longer widely practiced, Rinzler connected with Smithsonian secretary S. Dillon Ripley at just the right time (Gagné 1996, 28, 30; Walker 2013, 93–100). Leading the Smithsonian Institution through the most extensive expansion in its history, Ripley was seeking reinvention of the museum experience beyond relatively static encounters with objects, looking for ways to awaken an often sleepy National Mall (Walker 2013, 92). The Festival’s presentations of living cultural practitioners provided new approaches to representing culture that are interactive, interpretive, entertaining, and affirming for participants and their neglected traditions. These approaches were strongly influenced by the discipline of folklore studies, also engaged then in expansion and reinvention. The Festival became an ideal laboratory for folklorists to experiment with new forms of cultural representation. Their discipline came to view folklore as emergent in performance, situated in social interaction, and holistically encompassing multiple dimensions of folk culture.

In a museum context, the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife (later renamed the Smithsonian Folklife Festival) has since its inception provided a radical alternative means for museum mediation of culture for visitors. In contrast with exhibitions centered upon objects, living human beings present living cultural traditions in the presence of Festival audiences. Practitioners’ cultures are presented on their own terms and in their own voices, as well as through curation by cultural specialists. Audience members and cultural practitioners are encouraged to interact with one another, frequently resulting in immediate, intimate encounters and an apprehension of culture unimaginable in a conventional museum exhibition.

While the Festival was disdained in its early years by some Smithsonian museum curators (Walker 2013, 111, 116), through engendering discovery and interactivity it helped realize Ripley’s vision of breaking down the fourth wall constraining the visitor experience. While Ripley recognized the central importance of preserving and protecting objects, in his discussion of the future role of museums in The Sacred Grove, he states, [T]he object is merely a visible symbol of an intellectual process; the act of storage is a tangible form of banking information (1970, 98). The reason that objects . . . are maintained and preserved in such a setting is to communicate to us. He goes on to say, We must indeed experiment on how to bring these objects into communication with ourselves (99) and research the problem of how to create interest (101).

Objects on exhibition are never really static, and they exist in a dynamic field. This observation is especially true of aesthetic objects. Philosophers of aesthetics considering the ontology of art conceive of the artwork as not solely a material object. Art can have multiple modes of being, existing as a product of the artist’s imagination and as an object of the aesthetic and perceptible experience of audiences. It can be seen as an action or performance, possessing both temporality and temporal flexibility, with qualities changing over time (Thomasson 2004). Within a museum context, Michael Baxandall sees exhibition as a field in which three distinct terms are independently in play—makers of objects, exhibitors of made objects, and viewers of exhibited made objects, with all three terms . . . active in the exhibition (1991, 36). These three agents come into contact in a space between the object, and the elements of naming, information, and exposition the exhibitor makes available to the viewer in whatever form (37).

Museums stimulate and structure interaction with objects through a variety of methods that have proliferated since the early experiments with technology discussed by Ripley in The Sacred Grove (1970, 102–3). The Louvre-DNP Museum Lab defines the museum’s cultural mediation as employing the full range of tools and resources used to forge a relationship between a viewer and a work of art. Along with exhibitions, catalogs and the work of curators, this mediation involves lectures and guided tours, workshops, and installations, multimedia devices and the Internet (What is Museum Lab? n.d.). The Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Conservatory (HASTAC Scholars Program 2012), referring to the rush to embrace technologies among museums, sees them attempt[ing] to embrace a participatory culture facilitated by new digital technologies, while at the same time retain[ing] their expertise and authority as guardians of our culture and heritage. The public is being engaged with crowdsourcing curating, and museums employ technologies that include social media like Twitter and Facebook, the internet and mobile devices to disseminate their digitized collections, interactive kiosks, iPads and multimedia headsets. HASTAC sees the key challenge as ensuring that technology enhances and deepens visitor dialogue rather than acting as a superficial fix for museum marketing issues.

Museums engaged in dialogic, community curation, like the Museum of Chinese in America, share authority for representation with their communities, thereby realigning traditional museum authority structures (Tchen 1992; Tchen and Ševčenko 2011). Dialogic museums embody the concept of dialogism as an open, ongoing process developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), who saw the construction of meaning in discourse accomplished through multiple voices, contrasting heteroglossia with fixed meanings and monologism. In recent decades, dialogism has also been a driving force for museum interpretive programming, academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, and public folklore, whose development was strongly shaped by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (Baron, 2016). Dialogism responds to challenges by communities—especially indigenous and minority communities—with regard to how they are represented by outsiders. These groups have asserted control over how they are represented, and challenged the epistemological authority of scholars and museums.

At the 2011 Festival, Ofelia Marín Márquez of Colombia and Mele Vaikeli of Tonga share the techniques of their different fiber traditions, while Colombia program presenter Xóchitl C. Chávez and Peace Corps program participant Elena Borquist Noyes look on. Photo by Joe Furgal, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Institution.

As much as museums try to become participatory and further dialogism, the objects on display can never interact with visitors as human beings interact with one another—even though objects exist as multiple modes of being, within a dynamic, interactive exhibition field as mentioned above. Objects lack human agency that would enable them to engage in conversations and talk back to curators and visitors. At the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, in contrast, the living exhibitions of cultural practitioners performing, displaying, and discussing their culture are inherently and distinctively dialogic, with authority for representation shared among the practitioners and Smithsonian folklife curators and presenters. The contributors to this volume graphically illustrate how representational authority involves an ongoing negotiation between curators and cultural practitioners, with a constant objective of enabling practitioners to represent their cultures on their own terms. Yet, as the contributors often acknowledge, representational authority ultimately resides with the curators, although they do not exercise authority to the extent that curators of conventional exhibitions do.

The Festival’s curation of living exhibitions has its own highly distinctive benefits and vulnerabilities. The practitioners can speak for themselves throughout their presentations, employing a voice absent from conventional exhibitions. Audience members are able to ask questions and converse with participants, try their hands at crafts or dance to music with the participant’s encouragement and direction. In turn, audience members can share their own cultural experiences, becoming participants themselves. However, the living exhibitions at the Festival, centered on presenting living human beings in a museum context, carry a risk of negative objectification when the presentation is not appropriately framed and when participants are unwilling or poorly equipped to present customary everyday life practices in unfamiliar and highly recontextualized situations. A few critics of the Festival have charged that it is inherently negatively objectifying, with Richard Price, a particularly harsh critic, comparing it to highly objectified displays of indigenous peoples at world’s fairs and early museum exhibitions. Objectification, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, can be benign or objectionable, depending upon the overall context of the human relationship in question. (1995, 271), and it may be found in any social interaction. The exercise of agency is necessary to avoid negative objectification. Nussbaum and scholars of medicine have shown, for example, that objectification in such domains as medical examinations and sex can be mutually beneficial, involving willing subordination to the status of an object in order to advance one’s own interests, such as better health and sexual pleasure (Cussins 1996; Heath and Nessa 2007; Nussbaum 1995). Of course, objectification can involve stereotyping, exploitation, and dehumanization.

Over the years, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has invented, elaborated, and refined framing practices and modes of presentation to prevent negative objectification. Festival mediation creates representational frames such as workshops, narrative sessions, lecture/demonstrations, and dance concerts, where cultural practitioners can present and discourse about their culture on their own terms, rather than appear before the objectifying gaze of an audience as objects on display. While objectified, to some degree—as is anything or anybody on exhibit—participants are also able to exercise their agency to advance interests such as greater visibility and marketability of their artwork, ethnic pride, and advocacy for causes like environmental rights (Baron 2010, 69, 71–78). For audiences, the mediation provided through representational frames, when successful, facilitates more immediate experience of the traditions presented. As Martin Heidegger has stated, [A]ll immediacy depends on mediation. Immediacy is always seen already from mediation (Heidegger and Fink [1970] 1993, 160).

Smithsonian folklife curators engage in multiple mediations from the first moments of planning a Festival program, as we witness throughout this volume. Curators, Festival administrators, designers, and other technical personnel engage in spirited and frank internal dialogues about the viability, structure, design, and content of potential Festival programs, with a program plan resulting from their give-and-take. When planning state, region, or country programs, curators must mediate among government officials with responsibilities in cultural and political domains, who often represent divergent interests. Curators also engage in intense discussions with community members about how their cultures will be staged, framed, and interpreted, with community self-determination a paramount consideration. Since no community is monolithic, different members of a community will have diverse points of view about how they would like their community to be represented. Curators carry out research for Festival programs through fieldwork, reading published scholarship, and consulting with scholars. They mediate this scholarship in preparing interpretive materials accessible to the Festival audience. In programs with states, countries, or other polities, issues arise about choices to present one or another ethno-cultural group. At times, Festival programs are jointly curated by co-curators from both the Smithsonian staff and the nation or community represented in the Festival program, obliging curators to mediate among themselves in planning the Festival. Field research and documentation of the Festival itself creates a mediated record of traditional practitioners and the Festival, which is then remediated through electronic media that include websites and videos. During the Festival, curators often have to mediate with operational and support staff to assure the comfort and smooth adaptation of participants during their time in Washington. When the Festival is occurring on the National Mall, the enactment triadically involves mediation among presenter, participant, and audience in a discursive field that has a dynamism distinctive from the exhibition field described by Baxandall. Mediation continues after the Festival concludes, in the course of collaborative development and implementation of programs with communities designed to sustain aspects of the Festival locally.

Mediation of space is central to the realization of the Festival. From the Festival’s earliest years, Rinzler stressed the critical importance of imaginatively grounding presentations in the customary contexts used for practicing traditions in the participants’ home communities. Folklorists of the time had come to view folklore as emergent in performance rather than as a text fixed on a page. Richard Bauman, in the landmark volume Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, wrote that performance is an organizing principle that comprehends within a single conceptual framework artistic act, expressive form, and esthetic response, and . . . does so in terms of locally defined, culturally specific categories (1972, v). The turn from textualizing to a performance-centered approach to folklore resonates with Ripley’s view that an object is merely a visible symbol of an intellectual process. The staffs at the early Festivals were equally influenced by the concept of the induced natural context (Walker 2013, 113), first conceptualized by Kenneth S. Goldstein as a field research methodology for re-creating a performance context close to the natural contexts in which folklore is performed (1964, 87). The staff introduced presentational contexts on the National Mall, which, at their best, provide a striking verisimilitude to the places and settings where traditions are customarily practiced. Since the early years of the Festival, these contexts have included rice paddies, telephone switchboards, a stock exchange trading floor, and crafts shops. Programming in these recontextualized settings presents ethnic, occupational, and regional folk culture holistically as folklife. This method embodies a broadened approach to the purview of folklore that had long been employed by European scholars, as well as in open-air museums presenting historical traditions, and, beginning in the 1960s, at American graduate folklore programs.

Peter Hatch (right), a Siletz Dee-ni tribal member from Oregon, speaks with a visitor about his community’s efforts to preserve their language during the 2013 One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage program. Photo by Maggie Pelta-Pauls, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Institution.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus articulated the root metaphor that no one steps into the same river twice. Mediation has been seen as a universal process. Since the river flows and changes constantly while remaining a river—both staying the same and changing—it embodies the unity of opposites and the interconnectedness of contrary states (Graham 2011)]. The fluidity of mediation is in full view at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, as people from often vastly different backgrounds interact and engage with one another. These encounters are made possible by long months of effort on the part of curators mediating within and among governments, other Festival staff members, and communities.

Presentations at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival are often highly dialogic and participatory, but at times they have faltered or failed. Performance stages have been too high off the ground, distancing musicians and inhibiting participation. Participants have been ill disposed, reluctant to present, or vacillating in their attention. Presenters have been didactically academic, more dry college lecturer than compelling stage presence. Curators may not be able to fully resist heavy-handed demands by corporate or government partners, weakening the exercise of professional judgment. Deep reflection and self-criticism about hits and misses at the Festival are a hallmark of Smithsonian Folklife curatorial staff, which has refined and developed its practice over decades as the staff learns from challenges and mistakes.

More often, Smithsonian Folklife Festival mediations are spectacularly successful and immediate, resulting in what Robert Cantwell sees as the magic that takes place at the Festival when the forces that divide human beings suddenly vanish, effaced by the sheer power and excellence, the authenticity, of performance, on the one hand, and by the willingness of the visitor, on the other, to recognize power and excellence. Cantwell claims that the festival-maker can prepare for this moment; but only the participant and visitor can create it (1994, 180). The aesthetic frisson and bridges between cultures created at the Festival in the immediacy of performance are made possible by the mediations created by the curators. Their mediations pave the way for participants to foster deeper understanding of the meaning and value of their cultures by representing their traditions on their own terms.

INTRODUCTION

DIANA BAIRD N’DIAYE,

OLIVIA CADAVAL,

AND SOJIN KIM

It is early spring 2015, four months from opening day of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Through fieldwork in the partner country, the program curators determine that they will bring participants to the Festival to demonstrate a centuries-old bridge-building tradition and the rituals that accompany the process. They identify and engage one of the four communities involved in the tradition. Everyone is enthusiastic, and the curatorial team prepares a participant list. Shortly thereafter, the regional sponsoring organization informs the curators that they must respect local processes based on consensus and involve all four communities in the selection to insure equitable representation at the Festival. Accordingly, the regional fieldworkers convene leaders from all four communities and draw up a new list of participants. Three months before the Festival opens, there is a leadership change in one of the four communities. The new leader insists on changing the list of participants representing his community so that it includes his friends and associates. And just like that, in an instant, the curators must regroup to address this tension between different accountabilities and authorities—including their own—and reconcile it with their curatorial vision and the practical realities of production schedules.

Such shifts and renegotiations in program planning, impelled by everything from local politics to environmental disaster, are the common conditions under which Folklife Festival curators work. And over the last five decades, several hundred people who have assumed this role have had to come to terms—each in different ways, according to their particular circumstances and dispositions—with the requirements that accompany a major performance-based public program produced through a process that holds collaboration and community-based knowledge as foundational principles. This volume of essays explores the process of curating the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a free, annual event that occurs over multiple days outdoors on the National Mall in Washington, DC. It compiles the experiences and perspectives of a cross section of past and present staff curators at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which produces the event. And while the entire volume is contextualized by the Festival, it does not constitute a history of the event. Instead, it offers a multidimensional, multi-vocal exploration of the particular curatorial process of the Festival, examining the challenges, responsibilities, and forms of conversation that cultural representation entails; the ideals upon which the Festival is based; and places of friction and contestation that arise among the many parties involved in producing it.

Mr. and Mrs. Aubrey Smith perform at the 1968 Festival of American Folklife. Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Institution.

In 1967, the Smithsonian Institution’s secretary, S. Dillon Ripley, had a vision for pivoting America’s national museum complex to more directly engage with the public. The event that came to be known as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival was part of this vision, and Ripley reportedly instructed the first Festival directors to Take the instruments out of their cases and let them sing. This founding mandate established the Festival’s focus not on the formal qualities of objects, but instead on the people, communities, events, and processes that render them meaningful. The early years of the Festival coincided with a time in American history when many mainstream institutions were transforming in response to the civil rights activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Universities were establishing the first ethnic studies classes and departments. Community-based cultural programs and institutions were mobilized entirely through grassroots efforts. Similarly, the Festival advocated a populist vision of culture—one in which the traditional expressions and knowledge based in communities were foregrounded. Artists and culture bearers were to speak in their own voice, and the diversity of contemporary traditional culture in the United States was celebrated.

The mid-1970s marked a watershed moment for the Festival and for public sector folklore in general. The National Endowment for the Arts established a folk arts program, and the United States Congress created the American Folklife Center to preserve and present the heritage of American folklife. Several state arts councils hired folklorists, many of whom collaborated in the summer-long Folklife Festival celebration of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976.¹ More than a few of the authors of this volume cut their teeth on this event. The nature of Festival content and organization changed and grew in complexity over the next few years. During the early Festivals, the artists presented were not convened based on a coherent curatorial concept or framework. In the 1970 program, for example, there were performances by sacred harp singers, Southern blues musicians, Chinese dragon dancers, Portuguese American fado musicians, and Scottish bagpipers. Little by little, the tradition bearers invited to participate were organized according to a focus on region (Northwest Coast Indians, for example), traditional genres (dairy farming traditions), or themes (Working Americans, Old Ways in the New World, The African Diaspora). With each subsequent program, the curatorial teams continued to build on, reinterpret, and revaluate these thematic or organizing frameworks.

In the 1980s, the Festival showcased several programs featuring states. Although specific states had been highlighted previously, the newer state programs were larger and engaged local or regional cultural organizations and ethnographers to a greater extent as partners and co-curators. After their presentations on the National Mall, programs were occasionally restaged back in the home state, expanding the use of the Festival model to regions beyond DC. In 1982—on the centennial of the establishment of US-Korea diplomatic relations—the Festival hosted its first program focused on a single country, South Korea, initiating the development of strategies for collaborating with foreign partners. After this, a multi-year series of programs was organized under the theme of cultural conservation, addressing topics such as language and crafts in a post-Industrial Age and issues of cultural dislocation, revitalization, and revival.

In the 1990s, Festival programs drew upon emerging discourses in the international realm that paired intangible cultural heritage and sustainable development. These programs—such as Culture and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean—offered a broad range of case studies concerning local culture with the built environment, sustainable development, and cultural tourism, which advocated for the inclusion of traditional artists and their culture in local and global economic planning projects. In 1998, the Festival of American Folklife changed its name to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to better reflect its global scope.

During the early decades of the twenty-first century, the Festival has continued to build upon its long legacy and idealistic founding principles. But the external landscape has changed considerably with the acceleration of communications and globalization, among other major transformations that impact the dynamics of cultural presentation and representation: Who represents whom, how, for whom, through what modes of presentation, and for what ends. One year following the events of September 11, the Festival featured a single but monumental program, The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust. With planning commencing ten years in advance, it featured twenty-five nations, including artists from East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. For the first time, a site designer uniformly integrated all the presenting spaces to enhance dialogue among the participants. The program was notably one of the Festival’s most ambitious to date. In subsequent Festival programs, the governing paradigm would continue to shift from cultural conservation to cultural conversation.

The 2014 Festival featured programs focusing on the countries of China and Kenya. Photo by Francisco Guerra, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.

The Festival continues to negotiate new developments, partners, and exigencies. At this writing, the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage faces uncertainty about the physical location of the event in the coming years.² We also recognize that we work in a changing cultural landscape of organizations and players, amid shifting relationships with federal government and agencies, and in a new era of international relations. The potential for enriched content with a greater number of international Festival programs is balanced against the threat that these better endowed programs will displace domestic and thematic Festival programs that can be harder to fund. Programs developed in collaboration with government agencies—such as the Forest Service, NASA, Inter-American Foundation, the Peace Corps, and the USDA—challenge us to consider how, and if, we should apply the practices used to represent states and nations to representing institutional identities. And Festival staff continues to have internal and external conversations around issues of representation versus presentation, context versus setting, curating versus producing—and the way the tensions between these issues inform how we develop programs.

Year after year, Festival program teams continue to refine and experiment with strategies for collaboration and research, conceptual and presentation modes, design and production processes. At the heart of these efforts is a concern for providing just the right conditions for cultural practitioners to present themselves effectively and comfortably and engage with one another and the public. To develop the most effective and appropriate physical settings for performances, curators must literally interpret and translate performances from their natural contexts to ones that will be accessible to Festival visitors. This process involves an ongoing reckoning with the practice of cultural representation and its limitations and flaws, never losing consciousness of the voyeuristic dimensions and