News
PFP announces plan for a new home - and asks for your help!
(November 2004) After nearly 18 years of being a tenant, the Folklore Project now plans to open our own building this coming spring - a small rowhouse in West Philadelphia! We are reaching out now to friends and supporters, old and new, asking for help with a donation towards this effort. We need to raise $30,000 immediately to make the site handicapped accessible, to rebuild a front store section, and for necessary upgrades and repairs. We can do it with your help of dollars, time and labor.
We have great plans. We aim to reinstall Bill and Miriam Crawford’s dining room - four walls collaged with 40 years of social change memorabilia, which some of you may have seen at our all-too-brief exhibition on the Folk Arts of Social Change, a few years back. In the short month that the show was up, the dining room became a kind of collective memory wall - a gathering place that encouraged retellings of alternative histories. We welcome the chance to give the Crawford’s dining room a central and permanent place in our new home, and plan events when more people can share stories (and visions) of justice, as part of new PFP projects exploring local knowledge and rights/rites of dissent.
If you’ve visited us recently, you know how jammed up we are! Our new home, while modest in size, will give us more space for our important (and always free) technical assistance workshops, which reach and serve an extraordinarily diverse group of local traditional artists and grassroots groups. Over this past year, we helped 42 workshop attendees to raise $350,928 in funding for projects in the folk arts locally. (This is more than our own annual budget!) In the new home, we’ll have the space to expand our services to traditional artists, and to continue our advocacy for more equitable funding practices. We’ll continue our artist residency programs and arts education efforts, and will begin hosting some of these programs in the new site.
Already, the new place houses our publications. This year, we finished a beautiful new award-winning bilingual children’s book, Walking on Solid Ground about the meaning of arts and community in Chinatown, and I choose to stay here, a new documentary video with Community Leadership Institute about the fight to stop city “takings” of peoples’ homes for urban “renewal.” After a decade of effort, we are now finally able to release our documentary Plenty of Good Women Dancers and we hope you’ll join us in the new house for screenings. You’ll be able to browse our folk arts library, and (in time) to purchase books, videos, CDs and work by local traditional artists. (Learn more about these recent publications on this site).
These are wonderful dreams, and this small first home of our own is an important next step for us. We hope that you will help us improve our ability to preserve and sustain folk and traditional arts in Philadelphia. If you have given to us before, we hope you will consider it again. If you have never given before, we hope you will give now - as generously as you can. You can donate online through our secure site, or with a check to the office (PFP, 735 South 50th Street, Phila., PA 19143). We are grateful for any and all help.
Sincerely,
Debora Kodish
Director
