Forty Years of Missouri’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program

Published on Dec. 23, 2025

– history, context, and impact

The traditional arts are a cultural fusion of the arts and the humanities, where artistic excellence and repertoire, community ideals, and traditional knowledge are persistently entwined. Missouri’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (TAAP) formally launched in fiscal year 1985 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and Missouri Arts Council. As of 2025, the project has supported 464 apprenticeships—highlighting, elevating, and sustaining a vast array of traditional art forms and artists from every corner of the state.

From April to December 2025, Missouri Folk Arts staff have co-coordinated activities supported by a Missouri Humanities’ Major Grant. As that project draws to a close, Missouri Folk Arts staff reflects on events and activities that launched months ago.

In partnership with Friends of Arrow Rock, The Shoe Tree Listening Room (Springfield), and Missouri State Museum at the Capitol in Jefferson City, staff coordinated a six-part speakers’ series featuring legacy staff, who laid the foundations of the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, as well as key traditional artists, who participated in TAAP across four decades. Though the speakers’ series wrapped, we look forward to working with materials generated or identified for digitization during the last nine months in 2026.

On December 23, for instance, we premiered a four-part playlist featuring storyteller Angela J. Williams, both a previous TAAP apprentice and TAAP mentor. On August 2, 2025, Angela presented a remarkable talk about the importance of the apprenticeship program to her as a traditional storyteller and also as a human being. She paid homage to her mentor Dr. Gladys Caines Coggswell, who sat at Angela’s right hand during the entire presentation, encouraging her as she has for decades. In the audience, they were joined by Angela’s apprentice Cynthia McPherson.

Readers can find Angela’s playlist on Missouri Folk Arts’ YouTube channel. Additional playlists culled from talks by Howard W. Marshall, PhD, Margot McMillen, Carmen S. Dence, Pat McCarty, Barry Bergey, and Amy Skillman premier in 2026.