We want to say thank you to our outgoing Guest Curator, Lisa Falk.! If you missed a chance to see her fantastic artifacts, please stop by the Guest Curator Archive Page. You can also examine all of our past Guest Curator’s as well.
Welcome to our Guest Curator, Charlie Seemann!
Charlie Seemann is the Executive Director Emeritus of the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in Folklife Studies from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Country Music Foundation/Country Music Hall of Fame for 12 years, and then Program Director at The Fund for Folk Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before coming to the Western Folklife Center in 1998. He retired from that position in July 2014. He is the co-editor of the book Folklife and Museums: Selected Readings (American Association for State and Local History Press), the author of The Real Singing Cowboys (Rowman & Littlefield), Way Out West: Images of the American Ranch-Farm Security Administration Photographs 1936-1942 (Rowman & Littlefield), and co–editor of Folklife and Museums: 21st Century Perspectives (Rowman & Littlefield). He has produced and/or annotated more than 30 documentary albums of folk, country, and cowboy music. In 1983 he received a Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum as well as a Grammy Nomination for the New World Records’ anthology Back in the Saddle Again: American Cowboy Songs. He received a second Wrangler award in 2003 for producing Buck Ramsey: Hittin’ the Trail, a joint project of the Western Folklife Center and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He has written numerous articles on western culture and cowboy music. He is past President (founding President), and still a member of, the board of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, was a past congressional appointee to the board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and is a member of the board of the Washington D.C. based National Council for the Traditional Arts.
If you are a folklorist or a collector of folklore/popular culture artifacts, please consider becoming a Guest Curator. Your objects will be highlighted here on a rotating basis.
All we ask is that the objects be yours, you have a photograph of the objects, and all or most of the information about the object (see the guidelines below, for more details).
Guest Curator Guidelines:
1. Artifacts must fall within the subject of our website (folklore, folk art, popular culture, etc).
2. Artifacts must be a part of your own personal collection.
3. Submissions must be limited to no more than five artifacts.
4. Submissions must contain a photograph of the artifact, as well as the title, purpose, country of origin, culture , materials, and dimensions of the artifact.
5. We also would like your photograph and a brief biography to accompany the collection.
Please contact, flpcgallery@gmail.com and write Guest Curator in the subject line for further information or with any questions. We cannot wait to highlight your collection!