May 24-27, 2024
The 2024 Cultural Focus was Meraki. A greek word to describe the act of doing something with passion or love. At Folklife, it’s easy to understand this concept. This festival, as well as the other programs that we offer, is a work of love. Fed by a passion for arts, creativity, ideas, and the universal humanity found in every culture around the world. The myriad artists, cultural organizations, schools, and partners that we work with all operate with that same zeal. A commitment to their craft. So yes, the arts are a labor of love. A passion to create, innovate, express, and find identity through the exploration of our individual and collective souls.
The arts represent more than that, though. Social movements are accompanied by song. Histories have been sewn in quilts and woven into baskets. Stories have been choreographed into dances. The arts provokes us to live up to, confront, and reconcile with our humanity. Meraki is a salve for our souls, a barometer for our humanity and an inspiration for our continuing journeys. That’s the power of passion.
While it’s important for the arts to be thought of as a labor of love, it’s often misconstrued and all too often stigmatized as only that, fortifying the narrative of the starving artist or hobbyist. And artists certainly can be enthusiasts, but they are also professionals and cultural practitioners. People that dedicate their lives to the craft. To their credit, the creative and creator industries are the fastest growing sectors in the world, stimulating economic growth on par and even exceeding that of construction and development. We know that the arts are a driver of civic life, not merely a bystander.
We want artists to be profitable. We want creatives to be compensated for their intellectual and passion-driven labor. The money doesn’t always flow to the artists. The average payout for musicians on Spotify is $0.004 per stream. The average national hourly wage for theater actors hovers around $14/hr. Visual artists get paid once they sell their art, or like other disciplines, is supplemented through other sources: commissions, licensing, or teaching. To top it off, the venues, theaters, studios, and galleries that support these artists are closing at staggering rates.
Society has benefitted immensely from the conviction that accompanies Meraki. You have to feed passion, though. You have to nurture it. In many instances, that passion is being extracted, not cultivated. Meraki doesn’t just highlight the passion that people put into their work. It must be matched by the audiences and observers who benefit from it.
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Poster Artists
Raven Juarez
I use my work to talk to myself, to untangle intangible ideas, and find truth in experiences that once left me feeling confused, or unseen, or out of place. The stories I tell myself, the memories I relive, the dreams I work back into reality, have become my identity.
As a mixed-race young woman of indigenous heritage in America today, feeling truth in my identity is a sacred gift to myself. I believe in the unifying power of symbolic storytelling, and by offering vulnerable and intimate perspectives of my own experience, I hope to speak to the softest and buried truths of my audiences.
In words unspoken, my stories illuminate the intrinsic connections we share as co- inhabitants of the physical world and the ties between the private worlds we each hold within.
Eli Lara
Finding inspiration in the energy of the living psyche, Eli Lara is interested in capturing the forms and figures of the natural world in a tactile, visceral manner. He paints in a gestural and spontaneous fashion, capturing the emotions and movements of the living form, melding the experience of both the subject and the observer He graduated in 2013 from the University of Washington School of Art with a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts. He currently lives and works out of the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts in Pioneer Square.