Folk and Traditional Arts Blog by Todd Richardson: First Edition
The Nebraska Arts Council is partnering with folkorist, Todd Richardson, for a new blog that will be featured on the NAC website.
The blog will highlight Folk and Traditional Arts throughout Nebraska. It will be hosted in an accessible place for all Nebraskans. This will be the start of a new partner program at NAC.
Todd is a professor in the Goodrich Scholarship Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. He serves as Creative Writing Editor for the Journal of American Folklore. In 2025, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and he previously served as UNO’s James R. Schumacher Chair of Ethics for two terms. You can read Todd’s full bio here.
The following is brought to you by Todd Richardson:
My name is Todd Richardson, and I’m a folklorist. I’m a lot of other things too—husband, professor, artist and friend all come to mind—but it’s through my experience and education as a folklorist that I write these words you’re reading. See, I’ve taken on a new role as Program Partner for the Nebraska Arts Council’s Folk and Traditional Arts Program, and I’m using that as an opportunity to write about where and how I see folklore in Nebraska and what it all might mean, writing that I’ll share here, in a place that’s accessible to my friends, neighbors and fellow folk throughout the state.
If I could handwrite it for you, I would because I want it clear that nothing here is or will ever be written by a robot. Artificial Intelligence can be useful, certainly, but this isn’t the place for it. Let’s keep the folk in folk and traditional arts, and, towards that end, forgo the input or assistance of any robots. If you promise to read it yourself, I promise to write it myself.
So I’m going to start this endeavor with a little cogitation about what we mean when we talk about folk and traditional art. “Folk” is a slippery adjective, used to describe all manner of phenomenon, from the honorable to the disreputable, beautiful to the ugly. And I must confess that folklorists don’t generally do a good job of clearing things up, too often offering up a ‘well, actually” when they hear a regular person use the word “folk.” The funny thing about that is that “folk” is all about the genius of regular people. What makes something folk is that it is not elite, not institutional, not official. In his final book, my mentor and friend Roger Welsch defined folklore as “that part of culture that is transmitted primarily from person to person by informal means…word of mouth, example, demonstration, daily activity…rather than through formal conduits of knowledge like classrooms, books, galleries, or concert halls.” I like the way Roger phrased it because it captures the everydayness of folklore. Folk isn’t professional or elite meaning; it’s informal meaning, which can be every bit as brilliant and confounding as any other meaning out there. Indeed, that’s what folk and traditional art ultimately is: everyday artistry.
Glass Artist Amy Springer showing me an Open Arts Night Event flyer in Red Cloud
I have a friend named Amy Springer and she’s a glass artist based in Red Cloud. Originally from New Orleans, Amy has lived in Red Cloud off and on for over thirty years, over which time she’s been learning and growing as an artist. “I’ve never really been that good at it.” She told me, “I don’t have an aptitude for it.” I was surprised to hear her say this as I think her work is lively and compelling, find myself drawn to so many pieces, just wanting to hold them in my hand, hold them up to the light, as we walk around her studio, a converted drive-in restaurant on Red Cloud’s Webster Avenue. Simply put, Amy makes enthralling things. However, I also get what’s she saying as her investment with glass art is a little different. During much of her life in Red Cloud, Amy was a practicing family physician, and, before that, she practiced medicine in Los Angeles. Indeed, she still returns to New Orleans to work as a physician for part of every year. Art fits into her life differently. She is not striving to create work for museums or other official institutions, not trying to elbow her way into elite artistic circles. As she put it, “In medicine, you strive to be perfect, but as a glass artist, you can make mistakes and its okay.”
I told Amy I wanted to write about her as a folk artist in this, my first post, and she said, “Is that what I am, a folk artist?” Honestly, I’m not sure. Amy is not a conventional artist, or at least she’s not an “institutionally-trained” one as her institutional training is as a medical doctor. But that’s not to say she’s untrained as a glass artist as her education in glass is extensive, having attended classes and workshops around the country and world. What I want to emphasize is that her art took an unofficial route, and that that’s where I feel the folkiness of her art. Folk art isn’t about some grand narrative of art history taught in elite institutions, a history practitioners are taught to alternately revere and push against. Folk artists don’t work in history; they work in tradition, tradition they make their own through everyday practice. As Amy put it, making art “gives me meaning. You can’t not do it.”
I want to say that folk art is extraordinary art made by ordinary people. And it is, but that doesn’t mean Amy Springer is ordinary. She’s an amazing, vibrant human who conjures great meaning. While talking, she told me about an Open Arts Night in Red Cloud she was organizing, and the way she lit up was enchanting. For her, creativity exists in community, comes into being through sharing, and that’s a deeply folk way of seeing art. It’s ordinary people sharing their vision with one another, showing just how extraordinary ordinary people really are.
Amy showing me some of her pieces hanging in the window
Now, an institutionally trained artist might rightly say that they, also, take a tradition and make it their own through everyday practice, and that they, too, are all about the sharing of meaning. Well, they, too, can be folk artists. In fact, that’s the point of this first post, that folk and folklore aren’t so much walled-off categories as they are ways of looking. Every artist is a folk artist if you look at them the right way. So is Amy Springer a folk artist? She is if you want to see her practice and the beautiful work it produces that way.
And that’s what these posts are going to do. I’m going to take a capacious view of folk and traditional art as I engage with the everyday artistic genius present throughout Nebraska. I see creative magic everywhere I go, and I’m so happy to share some of that vision with you here.
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