City Lore works and succeeds on a fantastic array of multiple and complex planes. The organization addresses cultural work at intellectual, aesthetic, activist, pedagogical, and community levels. Based in a tiny, compact office on Manhattan's Lower East Side, it actually stands at the hub of a network with broad reach geographically and a history of building collaborations. To get to know the organization is to begin to see the impact of twenty years of developing relationships, acquiring community contacts, and getting to know the local turf intimately. And all this is the groundwork and context for artistic performances, exhibits, and workshops that go well beyond the range of what other arts organizations address.

I admit some bias here: as a folklorist naturally I will see the importance of an organization that addresses the traditional arts, oral poetry and religious practice, craft, language, and other forms of art often shunned by elite arts institutions. But City Lore does it, if not better, than with more community reach than other folk arts organizations. In their own words, they have a commitment to interdisciplinarity, incorporating arts education, anthropology and folkloristics, ethnomusicology, ethnopoetics, and history in their work. The art forms they deal with are similarly interdisciplinary: in one interview and one site visit, we experienced a drumming concert, presentations and photos on folk religion, a lace-making workshop, and videos on ethnohistory and spoken word poetry. None of this was presented superficially, and in fact it was the depth of understanding and the depth of the interpretation that made the experience so rich, as well as the fact that each of these were the product of months or years of artistic and scholarly collaboration.

Download the full LINC Site Visit Report.