Traditional Arts Indiana honors artists celebrating Hoosier heritage

Traditional Arts Indiana honored Hoosier artists at its 2023-24 award ceremony Oct. 4 inside Maxwell Hall. Seven artists received the Indiana Heritage Fellowship Award for lifetime achievement in a traditional art form. Traditional art forms are forms of cultural expression that have been passed down over generations within a community.

The artists received commemorative plates. Another 17 artist and apprentice teams were recognized for continuing a traditional art form in the Traditional Arts Indiana Apprenticeship Program. The program grants funding that makes these apprenticeships possible.

Traditional Arts Indiana was founded in 1998 to support Indiana’s folk and traditional arts. In 2007, the organization was recognized by the state legislature as the official organization for this purpose.

Associate professor Jon Kay teaches folklore and ethnomusicology at IU. He has also directed Traditional Arts Indiana for 20 years. 

“A lot of times when we talk about art, it’s very individual,” Kay said. “While this art might be done by an individual, it reflects a greater cultural background.”

The artists and apprentices hailed from many cultural backgrounds and regions across Indiana. They engaged in a variety of traditional art forms like net making, bluegrass music and Chinese lion dance.

“Indiana is called the crossroads of the country,” Kay said. “We’re a place where people have come to and been pushed to and pulled to over the years.”

At the ceremony, guests interacted with artists and apprentices who displayed their work at tables before Kay presented them with their awards.

Fourth-generation netmaker Larry Haycraft from Pike County displayed hoop nets, a type of net used in river fishing. Each net takes two weeks to complete, contains 7,662 knots and can hold up to 300 pounds of fish.

“You’re not gonna feed a family with a fishing pole,” Haycraft said.

His father taught him net making when he was 10 years old.

“Making nets was just making a couple of knots,” he said when he accepted his award. “My father said it was romance. You just keep going back. Time and love is all you need to pick something up.”

Professional folklorist Taylor Burden displayed woven goods she made during her apprenticeship with master artist and historical reenactor Peggy Taylor, a resident of Posey County. 

The pair met when Burden, Kay’s former intern, interviewed Taylor as part of a survey of southern Indiana’s traditional artists. Since then, Taylor and Burden have established a weaving guild in southern Indiana and northern Kentucky. One item they displayed was Burden’s table runner. 

“Nothing is too precious to use,” Burden said. “You can see the spaghetti sauce stains on it.”

Many of the traditional art forms presented blended fashion with function. Burden’s table runner incorporated historic weaving patterns and natural dyeing methods that she learned from Taylor.

Tony Dickerson, a nationally recognized quilter, and her apprentice Verna Moore from Indianapolis displayed quilts they produced and quilts produced by their guild, Akoma Ntoso, in central Indiana.

Dickerson said she was born into a sewing family, but she began quilting for family members at age 50 after her mother, who had also started quilting at 50, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

“I got hooked,” she said. “I told Verna, ‘I’m starting a guild.”

One of their guild’s quilts displayed the combined work of many members to honor ancestors who have faced Alzheimer’s. Another quilt created by Dickerson represents her family tree. It measures 70 inches long and 21 inches wide. 

“I can count seven generations of my family,” she said. “And in increments of seven, I touched the hand of a man who touched the hand of a man who was a slave — my grandfather. Three generations.”

Gabriela Coolidge, a K-6 teacher from Monroe County, also preserves family history in a traditional art form. Pysanky writing is a Ukrainian form of art in which wax and dye are used to produce intricate and vivid patterns on eggs. Coolidge, who married into a Ukrainian family, became interested in pysanky to preserve the tradition for her children after her mother-in-law died. In 2020, she began learning from her friend and master artist Natalie Kravchuk, initially online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Artists honored also included musicians, dancers and bearers of traditional plant knowledge.

Banjo player Jim Smoak was honored with his apprentice Graham Houchin. Smoak, a native of South Carolina who resides in Washington County, bought his first banjo after he sold a prize-winning hog at the county fair in 1946. Since then, he has performed at the Grand Ole Opry and Newport Folk Festival. Now he teaches bluegrass music in southern Indiana.

Retired teacher and guitarist from Lawrence County, Becky Sprinkle, and her apprentice Brittany Campbell performed jam music, which involves different instruments but is traditionally played at country gatherings. Sprinkle and Campbell led the audience in a call-and-response song.

“It’s about the instruments, but it’s also about the community,” Sprinkle said.

The musicians played together to back Helen Kiesel as she played the accordion. Kiesel has played the accordion since the waltzes, polkas and fiddle tunes of Hornville, Indiana, sparked her interest as a child. 

Kiesel joined Stephen Dickey for a performance of “Red Wing,” a folk song composed in 1907.

Dickey, with Kiesel and Haycraft, received Indiana Heritage Fellowship Awards. He is a fiddler and son of Lotus Dickey, a traditional musician from southern Indiana who is honored in the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival this month.

“Me and Dad were always playing together,” Dickey said. “We still have his fiddle.”

Councilperson Scott Willard of the Miami Nation presented a belated 2021 award to Dani Tippman for preserving traditional plant knowledge. Tippman is a Miami artist and descendant of Chief Richardville from northeast Indiana, which is part of the Miami people’s homeland.

Tippman’s plant knowledge includes how the Miami harvested plants and created items such as baskets and medicines.

At the end of the night Carmel-based gardener Kwan Hui accepted an Indiana Heritage Fellowship Award for his work in the art of Chinese lion dance. The lion dance is associated with the Chinese New Year in which performers wearing a lion costume mimic a lion’s movements.

“Our goal is to use this traditional art of our Asian American heritage to show the multicultural gifts of our home state, Indiana,” Hui said. “This honor is an encouragement to all of us to keep on doing our art.”