www.citylore.org

Since 1986, City Lore has been sharing the stories that emerge from New York City’s vast cultural heritage—reflecting the many people and voices that make NYC’s culture uniquely vibrant. City Lore’s art embraces different aesthetics, seeking to foster a wider range of communities, artists and forms of expression. Working in community-based venues throughout all five NYC boroughs, their work is not confined to a single location, but instead functions as a “museum without walls.”

City Lore works in four domains: urban folklore and history; preservation; arts in education; and grassroots poetry traditions. Their current programs include developing artist residencies for local schools that address the specific cultural traditions of students in the classroom; City of Memory, a dynamic map of the city that features the stories of people in their own communities, and which invites viewers to post their own stories; a biennial People’s Hall of Fame which honors grassroots contributions to NYC’s cultural life (past honorees include Tariq Hammad of Shaheen Sweets, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the Pearls of Wisdom Storytellers, and Aurelia Fernandez and Margarita Larios of NYC’s Mexican community); and the Poetry Dialogues series developed in collaboration with Urban Word for engaging young people in the creative process of traditional and contemporary poetic forms.