Master gospel vocalist and pianist Doris Frazier photographed performing with her apprentice Peyton Boyd in 2016. Doris Frazier stands behind her apprentice wearing a long sleeve all black outfit, she is an elderly lightskinned Black woman with short cropped grey hair. Her apprentice Peyton Boyd appears beside her wearing a tuxedo top and black bottoms, he is a younger Black male. Peyton Boyd is playing the electric keyboard and singing.

One blacksmith works at the anvil with hammer while the second observes.

Photographed during a live performance, master storytellers: Loretta Washington, Angela J. Williams, and Gladys Caines Coggswell. Standing at the microphone is Loretta Washington, an elderly light-skinned Black woman with short cut salt and pepper hair. She wears a long earth toned patterned shirt and green pants, brown sandals. To her left sits Angela J. Williams, a plus sized darker-skinned Black woman wearing a quarter sleeved black shirt and long black pants. Beisde Angela sits Gladys Caines Coggswell, a middle age Black woman with shoulder length straight hair. She wears a pink shirt tucked under a white cardigan, black pants, and black shoes. All three woman are behind microphones.

Application Deadline has passed for 2023.

Missouri’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program funds master artist and apprentice teams who are committed to sustaining their artistic traditions and cultural heritage. Priority is given to masters and apprentices who share cultural communities and have an existing relationship. Priority is also given to living art forms with fewer remaining practitioners. Missouri Folk Arts staff seeks new Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program applicants each year to best represent the spectrum of cultural communities across the state.

Missouri Folk Arts intends for the application process to be accessible to all. Please notify staff well before the deadline for assistance per the Americans with Disabilities Act, language translation, or issues organizing nomination materials.

Printable Application Available for Download: 2023-2024 TAAP Application

Leave your request for assistance from Folk Arts Specialist Deb Bailey via voicemail: 573-882-3653 or email: BaileyDA @ missouri.edu. For in-depth application assistance, please engage with Deb Bailey prior to before August 15, 2023.

Celebrating the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program

The National Endowment for the Arts, this project’s major sponsor, uses the following definition recognized by the field:

folk and traditional arts are rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community. Community members may share a common ethnic heritage, cultural mores, language, religion, occupation, or geographic region. These vital and constantly reinvigorated artistic traditions are shaped by values and standards of excellence that are passed from generation to generation, most often within family and community, through demonstration, conversation, and practice. Genres of artistic activity include, but are not limited to, music, dance, crafts, and oral expression.

Missouri hosts one of the oldest, continuous statewide folk arts apprenticeship programs in the United States, established in 1984-1985. In that first year, the apprenticeship program featured Missouri’s musical traditions, from old-time and gospel, to blues and jazz. The project sponsored ten apprenticeships. In the following year, the range of art forms was nearly equally divided between music traditions and material culture (saddlemaking, chair building, coverlet weaving, basketmaking, joinery, and blacksmithing).

Since then, over five hundred individual traditional artists–many in underserved rural, inner city, and ethnic communities in every corner of the state–have participated in the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program.

Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program