Keepers of Tradition

This Thursday, August 21, marks the opening of Boston’s Caribbean Carnival - a Trinidadian style extravaganza now in its 35th year. I attended this annual festival for the first time in 2003. Four years later I was offered a prime seat in the judges’ viewing station, where I shot this photo of Shirley Shillingford. She is a member of the Trinidad and Tobago Social Club, which is one of 9 area mas (masquerading) bands that compete each year. 

A succession of bands march their way down a 21-block parade route, ending up at Franklin Park. The King and Queen costumes are spectacular and they are followed by sections of exuberant dancing masqueraders. Be prepared for loud calypso music, the smell of jerk chicken, and vendors selling trinkets from Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, and a number of other West Indies islands. Many in the Caribbean cultural community live for carnival.  More than 600,00 people attend carnival, though most Bostonians have no idea this event takes place each year. Art critic Greg Cook previewed the event in the Boston Phoenix last week. It would be nice to have additional press coverage for a change. 

 

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Fall (and shorter days, cool weather, and school) may be just around the corner, but festival season is still going strong in Massachusetts. Two in particular are well worth attending.

On Sept 12-14, the Irish Culture Centre of New England hosts Icons: Irish Music and Arts Festival. Luminaries in the Irish music world will be there, including Solas, John Whelan, Chulrua, and many more. Plus Irish wolfhounds, soda bread, and stepdancing.  It’s like the Washington area Irish festival has been reborn.

The last weekend in September, I suggest heading to New Bedford for the Working Waterfront Festival  which is the flagship event celebrating the region’s commercial fishing industry. Fishermen’s contests, fresh seafood, boat tours, live music – and it’s free. The festival brings together a cross-section of the commercial fishing community — both those who are currently working in the industry as well as old-timers who haven’t been down in to the docks in years. Don’t miss it.   

Photos courtesy of Working Waterfront Festival.

To find out more about great festivals taking place around Massachusetts, visit Worldfest.

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The art of metalsmithing was one of 15 craft traditions on display at the 2008 Lowell Folk Festival. Retired sheetmetal worker Dick Clarke of Local #17, assembled and disassembled a tin man, explaing how the human form was fabricated from flat sheet metal. 

Weathervane maker Marian Ives worked in copper on a codfish vane. One of her vanes tops the Merrimack Mills, a textile mill building just a short distance from the festival site. Marian had never seen the finished weathervane mounted atop Merrimack Mills and was eager to find the building. The jury is still out on whether Hook Lobster will have Marian repair the six-foot lobster weathervane she made for the 3rd generation business, which was recently damaged in a major fire.

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Massachusetts was well represented in the crafts area at this summer’s Lowell Folk Festival. Festival goers got to meet and ask questions of artists who demonstrated the making of weathervanes, duck decoys, Chinese calligraphy, hooked rugs, porcupine quill work, native twined baskets, Ukrainian decorated eggs, Cambodian ceramics, hand carved signs, Puerto Rican carved saints and carnival masks, wooden boatbuilding, ship’s wheels, tin men, and white ash baskets. The participating craftspeople are are just some of the artists featured in the exhibition, Keepers of Tradition: Art and Folk Heritage in Massachusetts, on view at the National Heritage Museum through February 8, 2009.

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