Preserving Brooklyn’s Folk Art Traditions Through Digitization

The Center for Brooklyn History recently received a generous grant from the New York State Archives Documentary Heritage Program to digitize previously inaccessible audiovisual materials from the Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts collection. We're so excited to share this unique collection with our researchers and hope this blog post will provide additional insight into the collection and digitization process. 

Brooklyn Arts Council: A Short History 

Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) was founded in 1966 by Charlene Victor as the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association (BACA). The program facilitated collaborations between Brooklyn's large cultural heritage institutions and 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) to establish a Folk Arts program, part of a statewide initiative supporting field research, documentation, public programming, and technical assistance. BAC employee Kathleen Condon received an additional grant to serve as the program’s first Folklorist.

Under Condon’s leadership, Folk Arts developed a relationship with the Brooklyn Public Library to use library branches as performance spaces for the Folk Arts series. 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. After Condon's 1989 departure, 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. 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.  

Program highlights included 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. The following year, BAC gifted their Folk Arts archive to the Center for Brooklyn History. These extensive files included event planning materials, promotional items, budget information, research materials, artist files, extensive audiovisual documentation of events, artist submissions, and oral history interviews covering 27 years of the Folk Arts program.  

The Brooklyn Public Library not only holds the Folk Arts archive, but now hosts the Folk Arts program under the name Heritage Ambassadors. Learn more here. 

Access and Preservation 

In 2023, the Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts collection opened for research. In addition to the program files, there was immediate interest in the audiovisual items, especially the oral history interviews. Researchers browsing the finding aid were often dismayed to reach this note, tucked at the bottom:  

All audiovisual materials including cassettes, VHS tapes, mini DV cassettes, mini discs, and AMPEX Grand Master 457 1/4'' reels are unavailable due to technical limitations. 

Audiovisual materials are machine dependent, and our reading room doesn’t have the hardware necessary to view items in these formats. Even if we did, attempting playback can be risky. Audiovisual formats are inherently unstable and in a constant state of deterioration, running a cassette or VHS through hardware dating to the 1990s is not a matter of if damage will occur, it’s when. We were sitting on hundreds of one-of-a-kind interviews, songs, performances, and demonstrations that we couldn’t provide access to.  

Digitizing these materials would not only provide access but put in place a preservation plan that would allow the content to be accessed long after the physical media completely degraded. It was an exciting prospect, but a job too big to complete in-house. CBH doesn’t have the equipment or staff to pull off a large-scale digitization project, so our first step was to secure external funding to outsource the work to a professional digitization vendor.  

We worked closely with the Brooklyn Public Library’s development team to submit a proposal to the New York State Archives Documentary Heritage Program requesting funds for this project. We were delighted when our proposal was accepted. For the vendor, we selected George Blood LP, a Pennsylvania based firm that specializes in audio and moving image preservation.  

To prepare our items for shipment to George Blood, we created an item level inventory, assigning unique identifiers and noting the titles, dates, and descriptions of the items in a spreadsheet. Because we couldn’t play any of the media, we had to rely on the descriptions written by Folk Arts staff. Navigating poor handwriting, detached labels, and items with missing or no information was challenging, but we completed the inventory, boxed up the collection, and sent it out for digitization. Our final count included 139 VHS tapes, 64 mini DV cassettes, 5 Hi8 tapes, 331 audio cassettes, 4 mini discs, 4 digital audio tapes, and 10 AMPEX Grand Master 457 1/4'' reels, with audio and video dating from 1987-2012.  

A few weeks later the materials were returned, along with three hard drives that included both preservation and access copies. The next step was to perform a quality control check, making sure the content matched the unique identifier and description from our inventory spreadsheet.

It was so exciting to finally see and hear the performances, oral histories, and demonstrations that we've been reading so much about. To our knowledge this is the only documentation available anywhere for these programs. This digitization project allows these items to not only be preserved, but made accessible for researchers, community members, and students interested in the diverse folk traditions of Brooklyn's communities. Here are a few of our favorite examples: 

Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn: Traditional Storytellers and Their Tales was a series of programs featuring Brooklyn storytellers presenting folk tales, fairy tales, ghost stories, tall tales and the legends of saints in parks, libraries and community gardens around the borough. This still comes from a recording of The Great Brooklyn Storytelling Event, on June 11, 2011 at Central Library. 

The Brooklyn Maqam Arab Music Festival was a celebration of Arab music traditions in Brooklyn held March 2-30, 2008 which included of a series of concerts, symposia, and workshops featuring nearly 100 New York-based musicians and groups representing musical traditions from Egypt, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon. This performance by Eddie "The Sheik" Kochak at Arab O-Rama was recorded on March 14, 2008. The newly digitized material also includes an oral history interview with Kochak. 

Praise in the Park: Musical Expressions of Faith Held was annually from 1999-2002 at the Prospect Park Musical Pagoda. The program featured performances of traditional praise from houses of worship across Brooklyn, bringing spiritually inspired music and dance to a secular general audience. This performance by Charlie Storet and the All Stars was included in the 2000 program. 

These files are not available on our digital collections portal, but can be viewed in our reading room. Contact us to set up an appointment and dive into this amazing collection! 

This project was generously funded by the New York State Archives Documentary Heritage Program.