![Smithsonian Folklife Festival, June 26–July 1.](/web/20240606183609im_/https://festival.si.edu/images/home/2024/festival-homeslide-logo-2024-dates.png)
At the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall, Indigenous artists and makers, professional chefs and home cooks, musicians, dancers, athletes, and storytellers will demonstrate the depth of multigenerational traditions as well as new, innovative approaches to cultural expression.
Join a circle of celebration with stories, songs, and dance. Experience ancestral foods like the Three Sisters (beans, corn, and squash) and inventive, sustainable cuisine. Learn stories that underlie Indigenous sports and games. Hear how Indigenous youth are reclaiming their languages through spoken-word and hip-hop. Explore traditional arts that flourish in their connections to place and environmental knowledge.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, established in 1967, honors contemporary living cultural traditions and celebrates those who practice and sustain them. Produced annually by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Festival has featured participants from all fifty states and more than a hundred countries.
Our Festival takes place every summer on the National Mall, with free performances, workshops, demonstrations, and other activities. It is an educational, research-based presentation that features master artisans and other tradition bearers. We invite visitors to sing and dance along, try crafts and games, learn traditional recipes, ask questions, and take part in this unique cultural exchange.
Marking the first of six years of programming focused on Native American life, this program invited artists from Oklahoma to present craft demonstrations, musical performances, and nightly powwows at the center of the National Mall
Celebrating the recent “food revolution,” this program looked backward at long-held community traditions in growing, marketing, cooking, and eating, and forward toward innovations making these traditions sustainable.
Part of a three-year series, the program invited intergenerational conversations about the interplay of migration, creativity, and culture, highlighting the social power of art and the role of youth as bridge builders among communities, generations, and to the future.