Heritage Spotlight
Folk Culture of Bulgarians in New Jersey
The New Jersey Folk Festival will be celebrating the history, heritage, and folk traditions of Bulgarians in America through an array of music, art, and craft demonstrations on April 28, 2012. Bulgaria, a mountainous nation located on the eastern edge of the Balkan Peninsula, is a historic crossroads of the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Soviet empires spanning over thirteen centuries. The influences of the various tribes that inhabited the nation have helped mold a richly distinctive Bulgarian culture of which its citizens are immensely proud. Bulgarian legends and traditions and are passed between the generations and are captured in poetic songs, rituals, music, dance, costumes and jewelry, and today stories and folklore continue to form an important part of everyday life and national heritage. In addition to the country’s diverse culture and ancient history, Bulgaria’s renowned wines, regional flora, and UNESCO sites inspire interest from international audiences. Immigrants have brought to the United States many of Bulgaria’s traditional customs, unique asymmetric music, fast-paced dances, and applied arts. The number of Bulgarians in New J e r s e y, New Yor k, and neighboring states is extremely high compared to other regions of the United States, and the New Jersey Folk Festival’s mission is to celebrate those who perpetuate Bulgarian folk heritage in America.--Robin Drag, Heritage Area Coordinator
Heritage Area
Craft Demonstrations
The Heritage Area of the New Jersey Folk Festival resembles a living outdoor museum of craft demonstrations, static exhibits, displays, and living history reenactments. Visitors to this area are able to observe craftspeople at work, ask questions, and learn about the production of traditional crafts in an interactive setting. The presenters are regarded as tradition bearers, people who have learnt the craft of their regional or ethnic group and have willingly perpetuated the legacy. The performers of the NJFF 2012 represent both Bulgarian culture within New Jersey and the folk culture of southern New Jersey.
Exhibitors
Mary Archibald
Mary Archibald is a lecturer, painter, quilt maker, quilt teacher and quilt historian, and has garnered both awards and mentions from numerous quilt shows. She is a prolific quilt makers with an emphasis on historical recreations of antique quilts, and reproducing the styles and patterns of by-gone eras.
Clarence Fennimore
Clarence Fennimore is a devoted waterfowler who grew up hunting on the Delaware River and Barnegat Bay. He began carving decoys in the late 1980s, experimenting first with the Barnegat Bay style but ultimately returning to the Delaware River school. An active member of the New Jersey Decoy Collectors Association, Clarence Fennimore has collected decoys since he was a teenager. An award winning carver, Clarence Fennimore was the New Jersey Decoy Collectors Association’s ‘Carver of the Year’ for their 2002 Annual Show and his pintail was the featured decoy for the 2003 New Jersey Duck Stamp. He was one of two carvers to represent New Jersey carving traditions at the 2004 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and one of six NJ carvers to compete in the 2004 Mid-Atlantic Decoy Competition.Duck decoys like those that Fennimore will be carving were used in accompaniment with boats known as “sneak boxes,” which are predominantly associated with the Barnegat Bay in New Jersey. Sneak boxes are small boats that can be sailed, rowed, poled or sculled and are used to stealthily approach swimming ducks for the purpose of hunting. Duck decoys are used in conjunction with sneak boxes as lures for real ducks to land on the water. The presentations of Clarence Fennimore and the sneak boxes have been made possible through the New Jersey Folk Festival’s collaboration with the Tuckerton Seaport. The seaport, located in Tuckerton, NJ, celebrates the New Jersey’s unique maritime heritage and the interaction between culture and nature on the Barnegat Bay.
Niki Giberson
Niki Giberson pursued her childhood love of fiber arts throughout college by combining art (textiles), history, and business into an Early American Crafts and Culture major from Stockton College of NJ. In 1988, she opened Swan Bay Folk Art Center in Port Republic, NJ, where students of all ages learn basketry, wool felting and spinning, dyeing wool from locally grown plants, quilting, weaving, and even how to have a Colonial Tea Party. Giberson will be demonstrating spinning wool into yarn on a spinning wheel and needle felting with wool from her own sheep.
Nancee Jo Luciani
A featured artist in the Tuckerton Seaport’s “Tradition from a Woman’s Hands: Female Carvers, Historic and Contemporary” exhibit and catalogue, Nancee Jo Luciani is an award-winning wildlife carver specializing in duck decoys and will be presenting her craft past and present. In addition to duck decoys, Luciani will also be showcasing her jewelry and non-functional carved waterfowl decorations.
Mary May
In Southern New Jersey, basket making is believed to have originated as a folk-art that was more of a necessity than a hobby. Baskets were woven with practical purposes in mind such as to aid in fishing and farming, rather than as works of art. May learned that the technique for preparing the white oak to be woven is completely different from baskets assembled in Northern New Jersey and New England. Although her interest in basket weaving began merely as a hobby, it soon grew beyond that of a general craft.
Miriam Milgram
Miriam Milgram has had a life-long interest in traditional textiles. She pursued her interest academically with an undergraduate thesis studying methodologies for the examination of ethnographic textiles and a master’s thesis on the styles and implications of hand-woven aprons in Bulgaria. On her many trips to the Balkans, Milgram has investigated local textile and costume traditions. She practices the techniques that she has learned in the field from village women, creating both traditional style work and her own contemporary interpretations.
Nadezhda Dimitrova Savova
Nadezhda Dimitrova Savova is a doctoral candidate originally from Bulgaria at the Anthropology Department and Research Fellow at the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies (CACPS) at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Through her academic work, Nadezhda is the founder of the International Council for Cultural Centers (I3C), www.international3c.org, which is the global network of national networks of community cultural centers recognized by UNESCO to serve as a voice for community arts initiatives internationally. Within I3C, Nadezhda also created the innovative Bread House Network, www.breadhousesnetwork.org, which are developing a new model of social entrepreneurship based on bakeries-cultural centers, where collective bread-making as a method of education on healthy eating and lifestyle has already spread successfully in 12 countries on 5 continents.