Spotlight On

From our offices on the corner of First and First (First Street and First Avenue, a corner Seinfeld once termed "the center of the universe"), City Lore is engaged in the crucial work of documenting, preserving and presenting New York City -- and America's -- living cultural heritage. We work in school and community settings to link past and present through tradition and creativity, encouraging the process whereby human beings, as sociolinguist Dell Hymes suggests, "shape deeply felt values into meaningful forms." Celebrating our twentieth anniversary year in 2006, we continue to celebrate the City's grassroots cultures, and to ensure its living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions.

Current Programs:
As a non-profit organization, founded in 1986, we work in five cultural domains:

1. Place Matters. Since our inception, City Lore has documented and advocated for cherished local establishments, public spaces and community landmarks threatened in the ebb and flow of New York's rapidly changing cultural landscape. Over the past five years, in collaboration with the Municipal Art Society, this project has grown exponentially in size and scope. We operate a citywide Census of Places that Matter, learning from New Yorkers about places around the city that connect us to the past and sustain longstanding community and cultural traditions. To see over 500 places that New Yorkers have nominated -- visit the published Census on our Place Matters website: http://www.placematters.net.

   Place Matters also works with community-based organizations and preservation and planning professionals to promote and protect places that matter. Through public programs, publications, speaking engagements, and preservation advocacy, we help to foster new attitudes and approaches to caring for places that mark history and support culture. Look for our forthcoming guidebook to New York City, Hidden New York: A Guide to Places that Matter (Rutgers University Press, 2006).

2. Education. City Lore runs a rich and varied education program, combining in-depth arts-in-education programs with national outreach. In New York City, we have "adopted" PS 11 in Woodside, Queens, where we run artist residency programs which reach every student in the school. In addition, we bring folk and fine artists into more than 20 NYC schools, reaching over 5,000 students. Our programs highlight the immigrant traditions and histories of many cultures represented in the schools, and are designed to support National Standards in social studies, literacy, and the arts. We also conduct professional development for social studies teachers in partnership with the New York City Board of Education. Our national programs include our CARTS (Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students) Newsletter, the CARTS Culture Catalog (a mail order catalog for teachers to acquire multicultural materials for their classrooms), and a Teachers Center and library here in our offices at City Lore.

3. Urban Folklore. Established in 1993, City Lore's People's Hall of Fame honors grassroots contributions to New York's cultural life. Taking as its symbol a historic New York subway token, we present "tokens of our esteem" -- actually plate-sized, bronze versions of the subway token -- to individuals and organizations who are contributing creatively to the folk culture of New York City. This past November, at a joyous celebration, our ninth People's Hall of Fame honored Terry Marone for keeping alive the very essence of the Broadway musical -- the chorus -- by perpetuating the tradition of the Gypsy Robe; Deacon Edgar W. Hopper, for promoting public discussion about slavery by preserving the remnant of a segregated seating area in the balcony of St. Augustine's Church on the Lower East Side; Aurelia Fernández and Margarita Larios for helping to preserve traditional Mexican arts and culture in New York; Tina Pratt and the Swinging Seniors for keeping alive the tradition of women in Black dance; and Jim Power for beautifying the Lower East Side with distinctive, artful mosaics for the past twenty years.

4. The People's Poetry Project. City Lore created the People's Poetry Project because no other organization is systematically presenting the diverse oral poetry traditions of New York City and the U.S. Poetry is, in a sense, the soccer of the arts, requiring little equipment and open to all of us. It plays a key role in New York's ethnic and cultural communities. Founded by City Lore and Poets House in 1999, the People's Poetry Gathering is a biennial event that transforms Lower Manhattan into a poetry village, attracting an audience of 10,000. Previous Gatherings have featured Puerto Rican and Colombian decimistas improvising at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; readings by American Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz and the Eritrean Poet Laureate, Reesom Haile; and concerts by singer-songwriters Ani Di Franco and Patti Smith. Our poetry projects also include The Poetry Dialogues, a series of intergenerational poetry presentations designed to stimulate civic dialogue and conversation in community settings. The Dialogues creates poetry teams each comprised of young poets, elder masters, and poet-facilitators.

5. Special Projects. City Lore develops a wide range of special projects, and works with talented filmmakers, folklorists, artists, and historians who are developing innovative projects in keeping with our mission. In the days and weeks that followed September 11th, for instance, we documented the outpouring of spontaneous memorials and shrines -- an unprecedented creative and heartfelt response that seemed to mirror the magnitude of the tragedy itself -- and, in 2002, transformed this documentation into Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning, an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society and a virtual version on http://www.citylore.org. Our recent national traveling exhibition, Weavings of War, explores a trend in folk art still unfolding around the world: over the past 50 years, textile artists, mostly women, from Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and South Africa have broken with tradition and used pictorial imagery to communicate their personal and collective experiences with war. In addition, we produce documentary films, and serve as a conduit for filmmakers such as Ric Burns for Coney Island and his five part series New York.

   With each new urban sunrise, as New Yorkers go about their business of work and play, City Lore's folklorists and oral historians are chronicling what is most interesting and compelling about our changing city, making the invisible visible, and utilizing the city's folklore and history as cultural capital -- a resource in the schools, a driving force in preservation, and a way of improving the city's quality of life by holding up a mirror to this grand pageant of urban life.

Funding Needs:
We welcome inquiries from supporters about any of the project areas described above. All of City Lore's initiatives rely on funding from foundations, corporations, government agencies, and individuals. Our funders include the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, NYSCA, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Rockefeller Foundation, The Scherman Foundation, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and many others.

In addition, we welcome conversations with funders about two exciting new initiatives:

We are taking the lead in a capital facilities initiative called CATCH (Center for Art, Tradition, and Cultural Heritage). This is a consortium of City Lore, the Society of the Educational Arts, World Music Institute and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance; four groups who are working together to purchase a building that would serve as a cultural heritage center for the city of New York.

We are also professionalizing our archive -- including over 50,000 images, hundreds of oral histories, and traditional music and poetry performance tapes. With support from New York State's Documentary Heritage Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and New York University's Archive Management Program, we are transforming our working repository into a Study Center in Folklife and Local History.

Every month, the "Spotlight On" highlights the activities of a different 501(c)3 nonprofit organization located in the tri-state region (NY, NJ, or CT). The selection of organizations for the "Spotlight On" is based on criteria such as programmatic interests, geographic focus, and size, to ensure the broadest possible representation of the region's nonprofit sector.

If you'd like to see your NPO in the "Spotlight," please use this submission form to send us a profile of your organization. Or e-mail a description of your organization, following the above format, to nyweb@foundationcenter.org, with "Spotlight Submission" in the subject line.