New York Folklore Society

Specialties

The New York Folklore Society’s Gallery of New York Artists features New York State based traditional artists. The artists represent a wide range of heritages, traditions, ethnicities, and nationalities.

History

Established in 1944.

Our Mission

The New York Folklore Society fosters the study, promotion, and continuation of the folklore and folklife of New York’s diverse cultures through education, advocacy, support and outreach.

Our History

The New York Folklore Society, a statewide not-​for-​profit service organization based in Schenectady, was founded in 1944, with a strong membership base among people interested in folklore. The Society and its journal, the New York Folklore Quarterly (now called Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore), gave back to the community the folklore collected by scholars and lay people throughout the state. As folklore developed as an academic discipline in the 1960s and ‘70s, and with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts in the mid-​1980s, arts councils, historical societies, libraries, and museums started hiring folklorists and other cultural specialists to research and present in public settings the folk arts and traditional