Perkins Fieldwork

Yard Tableau by Calvin Fisler

This is the first post for this blog, so I'll take a minute to update readers about the Folklife Project at Perkins Center for the Arts, of which this blog is a part.  The Folklife Project at Perkins aims to establish a smaller center within Perkins Center that will be devoted to identification and support of traditional or community-based arts and cultural activity.  The project covers a three-county region, including Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester, which compose the home" region of the project.  We won't, however, limit ourselves to the home region if important connections arise that lead into nearby counties.  In fact, I've already pursued leads into parts of Salem and Cumberland Counties, which I'll find time to report on in a future blog.

We've been developing our Folklife Project since the Fall of 2009, with generous support from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (NJSCA).  During the 2009-2010 fiscal year, we completed a cultural survey of the three-county region, and made plans to develop a web page for the project in the next fiscal year.  We anticipate that the cultural survey will be an ongoing feature of the project, and that our "inventory" of community based arts and artists will continue to develop.  Our plan is to make the inventory accessible to our readers and to the general public, in support of folk or traditional arts and community artists and artisans throughout the region.  We expect that the inventory will become an important resource to the arts, education, and general communities.

Meanwhile, we've launched the Gloucester County portion of the Folklife Project web page, and anticipate that the Burlington County web page will be available by the end of the current fiscal year (30 June 2011).  The Camden County page will follow soon after that.  During the current fiscal year, I've followed up on last year's results by doing more intensive fieldwork in Gloucester County, and increasingly, in Burlington County.  As I say, we'll pay increased attention to both Burlington and Camden Counties in coming months.  In the short term, we'll launch all three county web pages, and then feed and update them as fieldwork progresses throughout the region. A word on our method.  The fundamental, grounding activity of the Perkins Folklife Project is: fieldwork.  I hesitate to get into a longish discussion of what that means just now.  I'll make a point of commenting on the fieldwork process here and there, and of course, some of what fieldwork "means" and how it is conducted will be self-evident as these blog entries unfold.  For the moment, however, I'll note that we use the term "fieldwork" to mean direct engagement of an individual fieldworker with people, place, and community throughout the project region.  This activity takes shape as observation, informal interactions, interviews, and later, "documentation," using photography, audio recording, and good, old-fashioned note-taking.  Fieldwork is an exploration and discovery tool, undertaken by an individual fieldworker working in a consistent, systematic, and methodical fashion.  But enough said about that for now.  More to come in the next post.