Fieldwork & Folklife « Ohio Folk & Traditional Arts

The Ohio Arts Council is committed to expanding public awareness of Ohio’s rich landscape of communities and nurturing a sense of pride among Ohio’s traditional artists. The OAC identifies, documents, and works to understand the many ways in which cultural values are embedded in daily life. We seek to bring attention to the aesthetic forms that firmly ground and deeply embed individuals in their communities — from practical and beautiful hand-made objects to stories, songs, dances, and events that connect people. Our overarching goal is to integrate and connect cultural heritage to educational activities, cultural conservation, and art and community development, in order to strengthen the fabric of neighborhoods, towns, and cities throughout Ohio.

Fieldwork Projects:

African Immigrant Arts in Ohio

Excerpt: Ohio rarely loses an opportunity to surprise. For outsiders, Ohio is often presents as a fairly homogenous state in the middle of the country, remarkable for the premium its residents place on politeness, its seeming resistance to change, the harshness of its Lake Erie winters, and for the initiated, the excellence of its varieties of ice cream. However, residents of the state know that Ohio is as diverse as the country of which it is a part. In recent decades, Ohio has—in its quiet way—increasingly become home to a growing population African immigrants. Often even people who live here do not realize that […]