Everhart Museum Begins Second Sunday Folk Arts Series

In partnership with the PA Council on the Arts Folk & Traditional Initiative, the Everhart Museum is working to sustain cultural and artistic practices rooted in people’s histories, traditions, and everyday lives in Lackawanna, Luzerne, Pike, Susquehanna, Wayne, and Wyoming counties.

To share and educate the community on the creative practices rooted in our region’s traditions, the Museum has introduced the Second Sunday Folk Arts Series. The series will feature a different Folk or Traditional Artist each month. The Second Sundays Folk Art Series began at 2:00 pm on Sunday, March 14th as an online presentation.

“The Second Sunday Folk Art Series allows us to honor and highlight some of our region’s amazing artists who have spent their lives practicing, performing, and preserving traditional arts,” said Stefanie Colarusso, the Museum’s Director of Programs and Events. “We have an amazing line-up for 2021. Some of the artists we’ll feature may be familiar to you, and some you’ll be learning about for the first time. Each one of them has incredible stories to share about their journey within their own art form.”

The folk and traditional arts often come from a specific ethnic, religious, linguistic, occupational, or regional group. Folk and traditional arts practices are shaped and shared within families, neighborhoods, and communities and are passed down from one generation to another.

“It is a program celebrating not only each artist’s art form but, more specifically, it is an exploration of their own journey within that art. Stories of the artists’ upbringing, their personal inspirations and teachers, their own artistic processes, and the way they have shared this art with others are also highlighted in the programs,” said Kimberly Crafton, host of the Second Sundays Series.

Those who will be presenting are Maxwell Kofi Donkor, Gaston (Bonga) Jean-Baptiste, Nina Kouznetsov, Frank LittleBear, Peg McDade, Sujata Nair-Mulloth, Mona Pande, Leo Schott, Jr., Doug Smith, and Dr. Kathy Wang.

The initiative seeks to identify and document traditional artists in the NEPA region, assist those artists in keeping their traditions and create community access to folk arts through presentations, performances, workshops, and other programs.

A full schedule of the Second Sundays Folk Art Series is available on the Museum’s website https://everhart-museum.org/second-sunday-folk-art-series-virtual-ongoing/