Oh, That’s My Arkansas

A Letter from the Director

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of traveling all over Arkansas asking a deceptively simple question: What makes your community special?

The answers came in the form of stories, recipes, songs, dances, quilts, family traditions, and memories. They came from farmers and musicians, artists and elders, faith leaders and cooks, newcomers and lifelong Arkansans.

And somewhere along the way, a phrase kept emerging in my own mind:

Oh, that’s my Arkansas.

I often describe culturesheds as watersheds for culture. Just as rivers connect communities across a landscape, culturesheds help us understand how people, traditions, stories, foods, music, and livelihoods flow across Arkansas. They’re not county lines or political boundaries. They’re shaped by lived experience.

At first, we set out to understand the differences between Arkansas’s six culturesheds. But what surprised me most was how much we all have in common.

Everywhere we went, people talked about gathering around food, music, family traditions, faith communities, and caring for one another. Catfish showed up everywhere. Quilts showed up everywhere. Dance showed up everywhere.

What emerged wasn’t six separate unconnected identities of Arkansas. It was one incredible patchwork.

And that patchwork became the blueprint for this inaugural Arkansas Folklife Festival.

The festival you will experience was not designed in a boardroom. It was built through 17 community engagement events, thousands of conversations, and countless moments of listening.

People were eager to participate. In every corner of the state, there was a genuine desire to be seen, to contribute, and to share what they loved with others. People were hungry to be asked, “What matters to you? What traditions do you want to pass on? What do you want future generations to know?”

That’s a powerful question, and Arkansans took it seriously.

This year also carries an even larger significance because the festival is part of the Smithsonian’s Of the People: Festival of Festivals initiative as we approach America’s 250th anniversary.

To me, the greatest gift of that partnership is that Arkansas gets to tell its own story.

For too long, other people have defined Arkansas from the outside looking in. They tend to flatten us into stereotypes or reduce us to a narrow version of who we are. But Arkansas has never been a footnote in the American story. We’ve been helping write it all along.

America’s story isn’t only found in Washington, D.C., or in major metropolitan areas. It’s found in places like Helena, Mena, Pine Bluff, Mountain View, Springdale, Dardanelle, and communities all across our state. The national story is built from local stories.

In many ways, this festival is Arkansas’s love letter to America.

You’ll see that in the artists we welcome home, like Bobby Rush. Before he became a Grammy Award-winning blues legend known around the world, he was a young man from Pine Bluff learning his craft in Arkansas juke joints. Bringing him back isn’t simply presenting a concert. It’s a homecoming. It’s a reminder that Arkansas wasn’t standing on the sidelines while American music was being created. We were helping shape it.

You’ll see it in experiences like the Movement Music Parade. I don’t think people fully realize just how much movement music has roots in Arkansas. From Lee Hays’s connection to Mena and If I Had a Hammer to Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s powerful interpretation of Down by the Riverside, Arkansas has helped create the soundtrack to some of America’s most important movements.

The Movement Music Parade isn’t a traditional parade. It’s a moving, collective singalong. Song leaders, giant puppets, and an Arkansas Movement Music Songbook will invite people to participate, not just observe. Because that’s the point: culture isn’t something we consume. It’s something we create together.

And that’s really what I hope people take away from this festival.

I hope they have moments of recognition, where they think, “Oh, that’s my Arkansas.” But I also hope they have moments of discovery.

I hope someone from Northwest Arkansas learns something new about traditions in the Delta. I hope someone from Mountain View discovers connections to Pine Bluff. I hope someone who has lived here their entire life encounters a story, a song, or a tradition they’ve never experienced before.

Because that’s the beauty of Arkansas. We are always learning from one another.

This festival isn’t just about celebrating who we already know ourselves to be. It’s about discovering who we are together.

Ultimately, the festival is asking one big question:

Who is Arkansas culture?

The answer is simple.

It’s all of us.