Today the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage launches Storied Objects, a multimedia online exhibition highlighting the material culture collection of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Featuring more than eighty objects created for and during the annual Festival on the National Mall, it’s a collection long cherished by our staff but largely out of the public view. These richly varied examples of cultural traditions and innovations have been collected and displayed in our office since the Festival’s founding in 1967, many of them behind glass and lining our hallways. Now web visitors can browse “portraits” of the objects, information about their makers, and stories about their creation and acquisition, recounted by past and present curators and staff, community collaborators, and Festival participants.
In addition to excellent craftsmanship and widely diverse forms, the objects in the exhibition spotlight on the depth of cultural knowledge and practice required to create such meaningful work. Examples include the Palm Eye Flower from the United Arab Emirates (2022), the Poi Pounding Board from Hawai‘i (2013), the Bocce Tournament Award from Massachusetts (1988), and many more. Each object’s story is supplemented by photo galleries and video from the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections and related articles in the Festival Blog, Folklife Magazine, and other sources.
Exhibition curator and research associate Erin Younger has worked to document the Festival’s material culture collection for over a decade, cataloging objects, researching their origins, and plumbing the memories of the program curators, staff, and collaborators who invited their makers to the Mall. The resulting exhibition, Younger says, tells the story of the Folklife Festival through the lens of the objects, focusing on themes such as cultural sustainability, the environment, foodways, and more.
In this context, the objects embody the Festival as a space for intergenerational and intercultural sharing, allowing virtual visitors to view and remember these objects fondly, or to discover them for the first time—no matter how far they are from Washington, D.C.
The exhibition expands upon a previous iteration called 50 Years | 50 Objects, launched in 2017 to celebrate the Festival’s fiftieth anniversary. As a living exhibition, Storied Objects is ever-expanding, growing with new entries every year.
The exhibition and its continuity are possible, in part, through support from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, whose generosity has aided countless projects and programs across the institution. Both the committee and the Festival trace their roots to former Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley, who was dedicated to cultural learning and preservation. It was designed for the web by Visual Dialogue, with object photography by Sonya Pencheva and Zvonimir Bebek.
At the Center, we often say, “The Festival never ends.” Here it lives on through its Storied Objects, their makers, the communities they represent, and the living traditions they embody.
Ella Ryan is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a senior at William & Mary, studying history and creative writing.
