Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts collection

The Brooklyn Arts Council was founded by Charlene Victor in 1966 as the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association (BACA). The program worked to facilitate collaborations between Brooklyn's large cultural heritage institutions, such as the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with local artists, musicians, and galleries. BACA worked to secure grants for artists and programs with a focus on Brooklyn neighborhoods typically underserved by cultural heritage programming. In 1986 BACA formally changed its name to Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).

In 1988, BAC received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) as part of an effort to place folk arts programs in counties across New York state to do field research, create documentation, produce programming, and provide assistance to other organizations interested in developing programs. In addition to Brooklyn, programs were started in Buffalo, Corning, and Binghamton. NYSCA provided funding and assisted with developing guidelines, hiring, and site visits. BAC employee Kathleen Condon was awarded an additional grant to receive a salary as the program's first Folklorist.

Following BAC's model, Folk Arts prioritized neighborhoods typically overlooked for cultural heritage programming, and communities which often lacked venues to stage events. Condon solved this by developing a relationship with the Brooklyn Public Library to use library branches as performance spaces. Early events included Alvin Forteau and the Caribbean Dancers (Trinidadian dancing and drumming), Lillian Habib (Lebanese cooking), Jamila and Mahmood Masumi and Nafas Gul Muradi (Afghan rug weaving and design), and Doris Jensen (Norwegian rosemaler). Condon oversaw all marketing and outreach, often relying on the host libraries to send out press releases and hiring community members to hand out flyers.

BAC had to reapply every year for the Folklorist salary grant. The position was part time, and after Condon's 1989 departure the position was held by a series of early career professionals and graduate students. Events continued under the Folk Arts series and Welcome Back to Brooklyn Storytelling tent, but documentation was not consistent. The first full time Folklorist, Dr. Kay Turner, was hired in 2000. She approached the role as a way to work on "large frame ideas that looked at the importance of traditions within the context of things that were meaningful to Brooklyn."

Dr. Turner took an artist-first approach, often co-creating programs with artists and staging them at larger venues to attract a more general audience. Additional sponsorship allowed Folk Arts to produce multi week and annual programs, with expanded promotional reach. Highlights include Harborlore: Where the River Meets the Sea in Brooklyn's Folk Imagination, a series of 12 free dance, music and storytelling events exploring the role of water in Brooklyn's immigrant and diaspora communities; Folk Feet: Celebrating Traditional Dance in Brooklyn, a multi year project to identify, document and present the range of traditional dance practices in Brooklyn; and Brooklyn Maqam Arab Music Festival, a celebration of Arab music traditions in Brooklyn. Dr. Turner left Folk Arts in 2014 and was replaced by Christopher Mulé, who served as director until 2020, when BAC ended its affiliation with the Folk Arts program.

See series levels for a full history of each Folk Art program.