Is There a Rosy Future for Folk Arts?

Tanya Kaspersky, 75, deftly poked her thick needle into the soft cloth, re-creating a stitch first used by her ancestors at least 1,000 years ago. “Since I remember anything, I remember embroidery,” says Kaspersky, who learned the skill in the Ukraine. But if she can help it, certain stitches she has mastered--many threatened with extinction--will never be forgotten.

Wielding a sharp, pencil-shaped tool, Ruben Delgado dug a zigzag design into a horse’s halter buckle. A master silversmith and engraver, the 32-year-old learned his art at 16 in Guadalajara, and has produced dazzling decorative and useful silver items for cowboys and ranchers ever since.

Kansuma Fujima, 70, led seven young women through the graceful movements of a 200-year-old dance. Wearing colorful kimonos, white face makeup and jet-black wigs, they swirled and stamped across the floor. Now a master classical Japanese dance teacher, Fujima first performed this “cherry blossom dance” when she was about 20.

Kaspersky, Delgado and Fujima, all Los Angeles residents, represent a tiny fraction of folk artists in the United States. In a country of immigrants, they carry on myriad cultural traditions that are generations, sometimes centuries old.

While a head count of folk artists doesn’t exist, 46 states (and the territory of Guam) have folk arts programs within their arts agencies. Yet California, a cultural microcosm of the country, has had none. Until now.

This year, if the Legislature accepts or augments Gov. George Deukmejian’s proposed $15.7-million budget for the California Arts Council (a likely occurrence, observers say) by the start of fiscal 1988-89 on July 1, the state will have its first traditional folk arts program.

“California is late in its recognition and support of folk artists, but it is now in the arts council’s interest to preserve and perpetuate folk arts,” said Barbara LaPan Rahm, a folklorist who has spent the last year traveling from Eureka to San Diego developing the council’s new program.

She is the likely candidate for the program’s permanent manager.

(The council uses the National Endowment for the Arts definition of folk arts: “Home-grown, traditional artistic activities” of “groups that share the same ethnic heritage, language, occupation, religion or geographic area.” Folk arts can also spring from family traditions, LaPan Rahm adds.)

Portuguese immigrants from the Azores dance the chmarita at festas , or religious festivals throughout the state, LaPan Rahm said in a recent telephone interview; Luis Ortega, an award-winning Latino living in Paradise, Calif., braids rawhide ropes for cowboys; and Bounxeung Sinanone, a nationally acclaimed Laotian residing in Fresno, plays his khen, a bamboo pan pipe.

Los Angeles, which, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, admitted 56,000 immigrants in 1985--second to New York--boasts a wealth of folk art activity as well as a two-year-old folk arts program. Local cultural expressions range from Thai kah salak , or vegetable carving that can turn a turnip into a rose, to zydeco, fast black-Creole dancing from Southern Louisiana, said Susan Auerbach, who heads the city’s program.

Yet many folk artists usually don’t belong to arts organizations that the arts council does fund, LaPan Rahm said, and experts in the field agree they can’t attract wealthy arts patrons or corporations that touring ballet companies or house-hold name contemporary artists can.

(The council did have a folk arts program from 1977 to 1982, added council Deputy Director of Programs Juan Carrillo. But it was always considered a “pilot” program and lacked the new venture’s singularity of purpose, sometimes funding fine artists instead of folk artists, for instance, he said.)

Among California’s Native American population older people are dying off and, some fear, taking with them cultural traditions that will be lost forever. That is why the program’s new master-apprentice grants were conceived, LaPan Ram said.

Certain pan-tribal bird songs sung at Native American celebrations throughout California are performed in a sequence, and “learning the sequence is as important as learning the songs,” she explained.

But, she said, “there are only a few older Indians still around who know the sequence. So we have younger Indians asking for ways to collect this information before these older people pass away, taking with them things that exist only in their hearts and minds and not in books.”

The master-apprentice grant program will team an expert folk artist with a younger one for a three- to 12-month study period. The council plans this year to give about 20 such grants. They will range from $1,500 to $2,500, awards equal to the national standard for folk arts grants, LaPan Rahm said.

The importance of passing on folk art traditions is not lost on Tanya Kaspersky, who teaches embroidery at the Ukrainian Arts Center in Los Angeles and hopes to win a council master-apprentice grant.

Kaspersky was born in Ohio but grew up in the Ukraine, where she learned her art from her mother and her mother’s friends. She practices many styles of needlework but mostly uses traditional Ukrainian embroidery stitches, many of which have nearly vanished from lack of use and knowledge, she said.

Why does she want to carry on this cultural legacy? For the same reason that “an archeologist goes and looks at those old bones, because he wants us to know what people were doing at that time,” she said.

“This (needlework tradition) disappears quickly, so there has to be someone to perpetuate it. If I leave one person after me to do as much as I do, I will be happy.”