Brooklyn Arts Council Receives $35,000 NEA Grant

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $82 million to fund local arts projects and partnerships in the NEA's second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2016. Included in this announcement is an Art Works award of $35,000 approved for Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC)'s Citizen Folklife program. The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.

"The arts are all around us, enhancing our lives in ways both subtle and obvious, expected and unexpected," said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. "Supporting projects like the one from Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day."

"BAC is honored to be a recipient of an NEA Art Works grant," said Brooklyn Arts Council Executive Director Charlotte Cohen. "NEA funding will allow BAC to support the Citizen Folklife program and provide professional development and technical assistance to artists and cultural groups in every zip code in our borough, work that is integral to our mission of service to artists in Brooklyn."

The Citizen Folklife program will mobilize researchers, educators, and Brooklyn's traditional arts practitioners to conserve its diverse cultural expressions by studying, collecting, presenting, and safeguarding traditional art forms. Through the Citizen Folklife program, BAC will provide a platform for communities with strong ties to folk and traditional art forms to deeply engage and share observations of folk arts practices within their own communities.

Consisting of six summer institutes and six public programs, Citizen Folklife will train "Citizen Folklorists" to: (1) work within their own communities to collect traditional expressions and document them with cell phones, cameras, ethnographic interviews, and still photography? (2) present their findings and the artists with whom they have worked at local community festivals? and (3) archive their digital assets using an online content management system.