National Endowment for the Arts Acting Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $27 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment’s first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2019. Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $30,000 to the Association for Cultural Equity to support the collaborative and ethical repatriation of archived Native American field recordings. Art Works is the Arts Endowment’s principal grantmaking program.
The Association for Cultural Equity recently completed a National Film Preservation Foundation grant project to digitally transfer and preserve items in the Alan Lomax Choreometrics Films Collection, housed at the American Folklife Center-Library of Congress. The project entailed selection of rare film material from the Presentation Library, which ACE will make available to dance scholars and researchers interested in the analysis method developed by Alan Lomax: Choreometrics.
The ACE team joined specialists in the field to present the forum Equitable and Inclusive: The Global Jukebox at the American Folklore Society Conference in Buffalo, New York on October 18th.
ACE's Jorge Arévalo Mateus and Violet Baron traveled to Mississippi early this month to repatriate early Lomax recordings from the birthplace of the blues.
ACE President Anna Lomax Wood published Part I of a 2-part series in Ethnomusicology, the Society for Ethnomusicology’s academic journal.
Called “Like a Cry from the Heart”: An Insider's View of the Genesis of Alan Lomax's Ideas and the Legacy of His Research, Wood’s article is part prose poem of remembrance, recalling travels with Lomax and working in his rambling Upper West Side apartment-office on what would be his life’s projects to create the Global Jukebox. The article also includes deep analysis of Lomax’s work and the criticism that it met with, as well as a synthesis of new research on the projects that Lomax, and ACE, championed.
