Rooted, Practiced, Sustained

Museum of Art & Archaeology Missouri Arts Council

News and Announcements

The four 2025 fellows

May 12, 2025

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, an award to recognize the artistic excellence and exceptional lifetime achievement of living traditional artists and community scholars in the Show Me State. This year, Missouri Folk Arts recognizes four individuals for their deep-rooted contributions to traditional arts within their vibrant Missouri communities. Please join us in congratulating 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…
Seated at a table, speaker Barry Bergey on the right listens as Gordon McCann tells a story about documenting folk arts in the past.

April 11, 2025

MO Humanities Grant News

Missouri Humanities has awarded a $12,550 grant to the Missouri Folk Arts Program to support an event series that shares the meaning and matter of its Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (TAAP), one of the oldest and longest-running efforts of its kind in the country. “Our Missouri Humanities grant provides us the opportunity to celebrate TAAP’s four decades and, by extension, hundreds of traditional artists who have participated over the years,” says Lisa Higgins, director of Missouri Folk Arts Program. “Every TAAP team from 1985 to the present has illustrated in word and practice how folk art…
Suzi Vause smiles in front of a spinning wheel display.

Sep. 16, 2024

Ozarks Community Scholar Suzi Vause

Welcome back to Stories from the Field and a new post in our Show Me Folk blog. The blog is dedicated space for staff, student workers, traditional artists, cultural experts, consultants, and community scholars to share photo essays on an array of topics in Missouri’s traditional arts and folklife. Guest blogger Suzi Vause is a long-time friend of Missouri Folk Arts. In 1996, she apprenticed in walking wheel spinning with the late Elma Moss. Suzi excelled at spinning on the large wheel, and the very next year, she mentored her own apprentice in the tradition. Suzi is known by all as…