MISSOURI FOLK ARTS ANNOUNCES 2025 LIVING TRADITIONS FELLOWS!
Missouri Folk Arts Program Announces 2025 Living Traditions Fellows
May 12, 2025
COLUMBIA, MO – The Missouri Folk Arts Program is excited to announce recipients of the 2025 Missouri Living Traditions Fellowship, the state’s award to recognize the artistic excellence and exceptional lifetime achievement of living traditional artists and community scholars in the Show Me State.
This year, the fellowships honor four individuals and their deep-rooted contributions to traditional arts within their vibrant Missouri communities.
Please join us in congratulation Harold “Bo” Brown (Rogersville); Howard W. Marshall (Fulton); Pablo Sanhueza (Kansas City); and Marideth Sisco (West Plains). Stay tuned to Missouri Folk Arts’ social media to learn about upcoming special events honoring these four outstanding tradition bearers.
Harold “Bo” Brown, Ozarks Forager and Musician
Rogersville, Mo.
Nominator Suzi Vause of rural Carter County, Mo., has long played old-time music with Bo Brown; in the last five years, though, she has come to admire her friend’s extensive knowledge of Ozarks regional plantlore and foodways. Vause is not alone in that recognition. Curators at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, for instance, invited Brown to the National Mall in 2023 to share his traditional knowledge with visitors. He helped staff the festival’s Teaching Garden that was built and planted to help illustrate the theme, The Ozarks: Face & Facets of a Region. For two weeks, Brown alternated between the teaching garden and performing on festival stages. At home, he is found most often teaching this traditional foraging and foodways face-to-face during plant walks, workshops, and gatherings on his Niangua River Bottoms property and throughout the region.
In a letter of support for Brown’s nomination, Tina Marie Wilcox—the head gardener and herbalist at the Ozark Folk Center in Mtn. View, Arkansas—wrote: Bo Brown teaches people that they cannot only survive, but live richly by deeply knowing plants and the creatures who share life in the Ozarks. He can identify almost every living thing that grows, crawls and flies in the Ozark Mountains. His delivery of information is both friendly and engaging though encyclopedic. Having been brought up in the Missouri Ozarks, he has eaten foods from the wild his entire life. He has taken this Ozark tradition along with his work as a professional birder and time spent out in nature, and created a career of teaching, foraging, conservation, and writing. His meals, ferments, and native food snacks are delicious and are on the cutting edge of gourmet gastronomy.
Howard W. Marshall, Old-time fiddler and Folklorist
Fulton, Mo.
Howard W. Marshall enjoyed a long career as a professional folklorist in both the public sector (e.g., Smithsonian Institution, American Folklife Center) and in academia, especially in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at the University of Missouri, where he also directed the cross-disciplinary Missouri Cultural Heritage Center for a decade. Marshall’s academic career included teaching courses that centered folklife in material culture, vernacular architecture, and historic preservation.
For the Living Traditions Fellowship, though, nominator Thomas Coriell extols Marshall’s contributions as an award-winning old-time fiddler and ethnographer who exhaustively practices, promotes, and documents the tradition as it has evolved in Missouri, including writing a three-volume book series published by the University of Missouri Press.
Old-time fiddler John P. Williams wrote of Marshall: I first met Howard in 1994 at a community jam session and square dance in Wein, Missouri. Howard has an eye (and ear) for an eager, up and up-and-coming musician. Howard was one of the first people who took me under their wing at this session nearly thirty years ago. Giving tips on how to improve my fiddling, the importance of jam session etiquette, and why the history of these tunes we played that day are so important. That day sticks with me more than any other from my years of being in the Missouri fiddling community; Howard’s eagerness to help, teach, and include everyone. Over the last several decades Howard and I have traveled together, met up at local music parties, competed in fiddle contests, and I’m gracious to still call him a mentor and dear friend. His desire to share his love of our fiddling traditions in Missouri, especially to the younger generation is admirable and I hope that “my generation” of Missouri fiddlers can continue this legacy that Howard is entrusting us with.
Pablo Sanhueza, Latin Jazz Percussionist and Bandleader
Kansas City, Mo.
Nominator Cynthia Ammerman, a jazz historian and patron, noted that she was aware of Pablo Sanhueza’s influence in the local jazz scene of Kansas City before they met in person. A decade later, she praises his evolution as an artist and commends his “long-standing record of excellence.” Like most traditional artists, Sanhueza attributes his family with inspiring him, especially two uncles, both music teachers and traditional Chilean musicians. They first immersed their nephew in the tradition, inspiring him to continue through high school and well beyond. Sanhueza relocated to Kansas City from Chile in 1996, joining extended family. He dedicated himself and his career to the music of Latin America as a jazz percussionist in the city’s Historic Jazz District. Over the years, he has performed with international legends, while establishing his own successful ensembles. Perhaps Sanhueza’s most important endeavor has been founding and now sustaining the Latin Jazz Institute & Kansas City Latin Jazz Orchestra, his home-grown apprenticeship program that immerses young musicians in fundamentals and traditions, while teaching them the workforce skills necessary to the success of performing artists.
In a letter of support, 2022 Living Traditions Fellow Carmen Sofia Dence wrote: He is a vital voice in the regional music and cultural arts community and his orchestra is deeply rooted in our shared cultural legacies. This fellowship is significant because it nurtures endangered traditional art forms, provides crucial cultural education, strengthen residents’ bonds, and offers an authentic perspective on American traditions.
Having witnessed Pablo’s dedication to his art and community, I am confident in his ability to represent the Living Traditions Fellowship with integrity and conviction, his lifelong meticulous study and research, collaborative approach, and deep understanding of the cultural context in which he works, make him a deserving and highly qualified candidate.
Marideth A. Sisco, Ozark storyteller, Musician, and Community Scholar
West Plains, Mo.
Nominator Kathleen Morrissey lauds Marideth Sisco as a central figure in a collective mission to sustain traditional arts, oral histories, and cultural communities that epitomize their region. Until retirement, Sisco parlayed the oral and aural storytelling skills she learned as a child and her college education into careers as a journalist (The West Plains Daily Quill) and a university educator (Drury University and Missouri State University). Since retirement, Sisco is sought after as a storyteller who keeps and shares the yarns of her family and of their region. Relying on her core knowledge, strong sense of place, and uncanny vision, Sisco has amplified Ozarks’ stories in books, songs, radio programs, and stages at home, at the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and across the country.
Sisco says of herself: I grew up in a small Ozarks village in the days before television or air conditioning, gathering with kinfolk on the front porches and firesides of my Ozarks extended family and friends. There I learned, from the time I could talk, the cadences, forms and structures of the “old-timers” telling their homespun stories. And I learned to sing the old songs in the old way.
Of Marideth’s contributions to their local mission, Morrissey writes: As we saw the need for a place to collect and present the oral histories and community stories of this place, we connected the dots between art, culture, humanities, and community outreach. Marideth has been the backbone for much of our efforts. Her work with the local newspaper, her understanding of regional nuance, and her ability to tell our stories are critical for our work . . . her role has been foundational. Whether it is providing vision or developing projects, she is there . . . We hope you will see her as we do. A one-of-a-kind voice from a place that matters.