(above – Floyd Center for the Arts, Photo by Brandon Phillips)

On August 26, 2023, Floyd Center for the Arts will be launching its first “Living Traditions Festival”, celebrating Floyd County’s vibrant Folk and Traditional Arts.  The goal of the festival will be to highlight and celebrate the county’s lively folk arts scene.

Floyd boosters and institutional leaders have succeeded in raising Floyd County’s profile as a place of significance in the world of bluegrass music.  Though not a focus of as much effort in the past, it is now time for the rich heritage of folk-art traditions to shine!

Folk arts are often depicted as quaint, nostalgic skills ‘from the good old days.’  The Living Traditions Festival will highlight the crafts of yesteryear, raise awareness of current folk art practices, and inspire interest in learning to ensure those arts will live on.

“The Floyd Center for the Arts is determined to show that our artistic traditions remain alive and meaningful today and into the future,” explains Executive Director, Keela Dooley Marshall.

The event will take place both indoors and outdoors at the Floyd Center for the Arts, located just outside downtown Floyd in an eighty-year-old dairy barn, a fitting setting for celebrating traditional arts. The festival will showcase traditional and contemporary expressions of traditional crafts, including basketmaking, quilting, spinning, weaving, instrument making, blacksmithing, woodworking, and more. Local bluegrass musicians and performers will provide an authentic Appalachian ambiance.  The Living Traditions Festival will be a free event, with food vendors on site.
(left: Students in the Pottery Studio at the Floyd Center for the Arts, Photo by Brandon Phillips)

It has been said that traditional and contemporary arts are different slices of the same cake.  The Floyd Center for the Arts will present the ‘whole cake’ with this Living Traditions Festival, celebrating traditional folk arts that have long been and remain central to a shared Appalachian heritage.

Floyd’s shared community heritage is another reason to celebrate.  The goal of Floyd Center for the Arts is to bring together the whole of Floyd; the older families who have lived here for generations, the back-to-the-landers who migrated to the area in the ’70s and ’80s, and the more recent transplants enjoying retirement or working in and around the region.  All have unique perspectives and have made significant contributions to Floyd’s unique artistic culture.

Those attending the Living traditions Festival will be invited to participate in the shared creative experience of a Community Art Quilt Project.  Visitors will have an opportunity to create their own quilt squares that will be connected throughout the day.  The resulting quilt will serve as a tangible expression of a traditional practice used to represent the beauty of diversity and community’s strength.  “We want to create a commemorative festival quilt to showcase everybody’s creative side!” says Keela Dooley Marshall.

In addition to works and demonstrations by current-day practitioners, precious artifacts from the collection of the Old Church Gallery, Floyd’s cultural arts museum, will be on display.  Catherine Pauley, Floyd’s unofficial culture keeper and 2023 Floyd Center for the Arts Distinguished Artist, will tell stories about the history and people behind the artifact while Floyd community accomplished neighbors lead demonstrations and activities at various stations.

Young and old alike will marvel as a blacksmith forges tools, a woodworker operates a lathe to turn a spindle, or a luthier explains the steps involved in creating stringed instruments.  Children will be inspired to practice traditional crafts while they make paper quilts, dye yarn, and weave mats.

Food can be enjoyed at tables outside in the Center’s new pollinator garden.  For those who prefer to eat indoors, food can be enjoyed while listening to a variety of lectures, such as “Black Americans in Old Time Music, Then and Now”, “Quilt and Quilters of Floyd County”, and “Keepers of the Tradition”.  Traditional arts, by their nature, are passed from generation to generation.  For these arts to survive, it is essential to cultivate this passing on of skills from one generation to the next, with older adults an young people working together.  (left: Old Dominion Blacksmithing Association at the Floyd Center for the Arts, Photo by Brandon Phillips)

This day, full of ‘Then and Now’ folk arts, also intends to stir interest among young people in learning these ‘old ways’.  In conjunction with the festival, the Art Center will host a series of educational workshops for children and adults, to grow and disseminate artistic skills for a new generation of folk-art practitioners.  An essential element of each class will be imparting the historical context of the traditional practice.  Items created by participants of the workshops will be on display at the festival.

Sponsored by Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Floyd Center for the Arts is proud to play an important role in ensuring that the unique and time-honored culture of traditional arts in Floyd County remains Living Traditions.

Floyd Center for the Arts • 220 Parkway Lane South
www.FloydArtCenter.org • 540-745-2784