home >> about
the center >> folklife in your state >> colorado
Colorado
The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress through Public Law 94-201 and charged to "preserve and present American folklife." The Center incorporates the Archive
of Folk Culture, which was established at the Library of Congress in 1928, and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world.
Collections
The collections of the American Folklife Center contain rich and varied
materials from Colorado that document the diversity of the state's folk
traditions. Among its unique recordings are Mexican songs from the 1940s;
Native American music; and cowboy poetry. In 1989-91, the Center conducted
a field research project documenting the culture and traditions of Italian-Americans
in the West, including the Italian-American community of Pueblo, Colorado.
The project culminated in a traveling exhibition and companion book of
essays. The documentary material created during the project--hundreds of
hours of interviews, thousands of photographs, and hundreds of pages of
transcriptions and other documents--has been incorporated into the collections
of the Center. In 1994 and 1995, the Center conducted a field school based
in Colorado Springs and southern Colorado that resulted in a modest collection
of photographs, recordings, and other documents.
- Colorado Collections in the Archive
of Folk Culture [full text]
American Folklife Center Collections presented online through the American
Memory project include Hispano
Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: the Juan Rael Collection,
an ethnographic field collection documenting religious and secular music
of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern
Colorado compiled by Juan Batista Rael in 1940.
Colorado participated in the Library's Bicentennial Local Legacies project,
which includes documentation of local traditions and celebrations for the
American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture.
Field School
An ethnographic field school was conducted in the San Luis Valley of Southern
Colorado in 1994, documenting aagricultural traditions related to sustainable
agriculture. The field school was co-sponsored by the Center and Colorado
College. To read an article about the field school by James Hardin, see "Documenting
Traditional Culture: A Colorado Field School,"
in Folklife Center News, Fall 1994. [full text]
Field Research Projects
Public Programs
- 1984 "The American Cowboy" (exhibit), Denver Museum of Art,
Denver.
- 1994 and 1995: "Documenting Traditional Culture" (Field School), Colorado College,
Colorado Springs. [related article]
Publications
- Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian American Folklife in the West. [catalog record]
- A
Brief List of Materials Related to Colorado Folk Music (bibliography
from 1970). [full text]
|