- Metamorphosis 2022
- Lagom 2023
- Meraki 2024
- Ikigai 2025
- Ubuntu 2026
52nd Annual Northwest Folklife Festival, May 26-29, 2023
Last year’s Cultural Focus, Metamorphosis, took us through a journey of change, transformations, and transition. We reminded ourselves that change happens all around us and that it is natural to adjust and reorient. We also reminded ourselves that healthy change embraces the old as well as the new. Change is how we survive!
The journey continues with this year’s Cultural Focus, Lagom: Not too much, not too little, but just right!
This Scandinavian term speaks to the notions of balance. When change happens in a person’s or communities life, you have to adapt to your new environment. You’ve got to reassess, find your footing, interrogate your conditions, and create a path for new beginnings. Just like metamorphosis, this requires hands-on involvement and participation.
Everyone and everything’s Lagom is different. Different experiences and different environments inform different paths, different processes, and different resources to determine that balance. No person or community is a monolith, and our stories—past, present, and future—are a constant tinkering to find and sustain that balance.
This marks the beginning of the next leg of our journey—a wandering to find our stride in an evolving ecosystem that obliges us to find equilibrium, composure, and presence of mind. Balance is how we survive!
Check back for updates!
New to the Festival
Threads of the People
Threads of the People is our take on a
fashion show, featuring a mix of
runway shows, workshops and
demos, vendor booths, displays
and material swaps. This new
addition to the festival will
explore fashion as a folk art, the
ways in which fashion and
culture are interwoven, and
seek to bring fashion back to its
roots - when our clothing was
created in homes, by hand, and
from materials found in our
natural environment.
Read More...
Kuleana Corridor
NW Folklife’s exploration of the
Folk vocation, bringing the
people, communities,
organizations, and cooperatives
who are actively engaging in
techniques that promote bio-
diversity, support sustainable &
healthy food production, and
give strength to the cause of
food justice, security, and
sovereignty.
Read more...
The Maker’s Space
The Maker’s Space is designed
to showcase and give hands-on
demonstrations of the wide
world of craft. We want to
encourage and instill a sense of
wonder and imagination in our
own creative imaginings and
curiosities.
Read more...