The Virginia Folklife Program of Virginia Humanities has awarded six teams of artists Folklife Apprenticeships for 2024–2025. Since 2002, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Virginia Folklife has funded 154 apprenticeships in cultural traditions, serving 346 individuals to date.
In addition to financial support—each team receives $5000 for 12-months of self-designed learning—this opportunity helps connect these cultural ambassadors with new audiences. Folklife staff co-produce short films with the apprenticeship teams and screen them at public programs after the apprenticeship year is complete.
As a result, mentors are often reinvigorated in their practice, apprentices develop specialty skills through one-on-one learning, and Virginians can learn about local culture through their work.
“The attention that the Folklife Apprenticeship Program has brought to our community has been both significant and humbling.”
D. Brad Hatch, mentor artist (Patawomeck Eel Pots, 2022)
“Our 2024 apprenticeship teams include small business owners, renowned musicians in bluegrass and Uyghur dutar and singing, along with experts in homemaking skills like canning, broom making, and sewing,” said Katy Clune, Virginia state folklorist and director of the Folklife Program. “We are honored to support their work through these awards and grateful for the federal and state support we receive.”
The next round of Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program applications will be available in November 2024 and due in April 2025.
Meet the 2024 Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Teams
Custom Sewing and Clothing Alterations
Lelia Nelson (Staunton) and April Hobson (Waynesboro)
Lelia sewed as a child, learning how to make doll clothes from her mother. She went on to major in home economics, textiles, and clothing, and opened her business more than 25 years ago. Her Staunton studio, Anointed Apparel & Accessories, specializes in liturgical textiles and has also made costumes for Mary Baldwin University’s Ajani and Kwanzaa celebration for years.
“Being able to service the church community by providing clergy outfits and accessories is important to me. There is a need that my gift allows me to fulfill,” Lelia shared.
Her apprentice April Hobson is interested in growing her sewing skills to serve her pageant community, explaining: “As a current reigning pageant queen, I would like to help other queens feel confident in their stage outfits in order to win their next crown.”
Lelia Nelson. Photo courtesy of Lelia Nelson April Hobson. Photo courtesy of Lelia Nelson
Southern Style Singing Traditions (Accompanied and Unaccompanied)
Alice Gerrard (Durham, NC) and Sophie Moeckel (Floyd)
Alice Gerrard is recognized as bluegrass trailblazer and was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2017 with her singing partner Hazel Dickens. Alice continues to perform, record, and teach, including at the Floyd Country Store’s Handmade Music School, where she met Sophie Moeckel. Alice will work with Sophie in southern singing traditions.
While Alice and Sophie are separated by generations, they are both dedicated educators. By learning directly from Alice, Sophie continues the tradition of learning from esteemed community members—the way Alice learned to play and sing.
“The lifestyle we had growing up on my family farm connected us to the mountains and the land. This is portrayed in traditional music in such a beautiful way it feels like home to me,” Sophie said. “It is also still so very alive in this region, and there’s an urgency to keep it that way and a beautiful revival among young people interested in traditional music and dance that I am proud to be part of. I’m particularly drawn to the community-based nature of traditional music and how it creates a shared language that transcends age, gender, political beliefs, education and so many of the things that divide the world today.”
Alice Gerrard. Photo by Libby Rodenbough/Rolling Stone Sophie Moeckel. Photo courtesy of Sophie Moeckel
Traditional Virginia Foodways
Leni Sorensen (White Hall) and Elizabeth Beamon (Charlottesville)
Food historian Leni Sorenson will apprentice Elizabeth Beamon in methods of traditional Virginia foodways, with an emphasis on home gardening, raising chickens, canning, outdoor cooking. Leni will also mentor Elizabeth in developing entrepreneurial skills such as designing and hosting historical dinners and offering foodways demonstrations.
Leni is a lecturer and demonstrator of 18th and 19th century Virginia foodways, lending her knowledge and skills to interpretation at Monticello, as well as the PBS series Taste of History and Netflix’s High on the Hog.
“Since the pandemic there has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in the traditions (mythic or actual) of self-reliance in our American past,” Leni said. “Folks are looking for roots, and as part of that, for food security.”
Leni met her apprentice Elizabeth (who goes by Liz) on a farm three years ago, and since then has invited Liz to assist her in the kitchen, including helping to prepare historic dinners for paying guests.
“The tradition of foodways, canning and cookery is the stuff of life and homeplace. I believe the way to create a homeplace for yourself and others is to first be able to sustain yourself. When you have a place and a meal and can feed others, there is a possibility to fuel social change,” Liz said.
Broom Making
John Alexander (Independence) and Erin Simons (Wytheville)
John Alexander and Erin Simons will dedicate their apprenticeship to the historical study and practice of Appalachian broom making traditions, starting with the raising, harvesting, and processing of the raw material: broomcorn.
They will make ten different styles of broom historically found in the region since the 1800s, research superstitions surrounding brooms and broom making, and visit contemporary small broom industries in Appalachia, including at Berea College in Kentucky. In 1975, as a young student at Berea, John was assigned to work in the college’s broom shop under Johnny Reed, “who could make every type of broom imaginable, and then some.”
“I first heard of broom making from my Great Aunt Draper, who grew up in the late 1800s,” John said. “She told the story of the local broom maker in Fairfield, Virginia, riding out to her farm with a load of brooms and her family trading their broomcorn crop to him for several finished brooms.”
When Erin was introduced to broom making at the Arrowmont School of Craft in 2019, her curiosity was sparked, and her local crafts grapevine led her to John Alexander.
“Although we are a generation apart, we have many similarities,” she said. “He and I are both educators by profession. He raised six children and I am raising four. He has a wealth of knowledge that I am eager to learn for myself. Whenever I visit places with my brooms, people ask me if I know a Grayson County broom maker named John Alexander. Fortunately, I can tell them: ‘Yes, he taught me how to make these.’”
Uyghur Traditional Music
Hayrunisa Yenilmes and Amar Kilich (Alexandria) & Ajinur Setiwaldi and Subhinur Elemin (Arlington)
Hayrunisa Yenilmes was born into a Sufi family in Kashgar, a 2000-year-old city in the Uyghur homeland, and was trained in Quran recitation from a very young age. One of her teachers was Abdurehim Heyt, a renowned Uyghur singer.
Amar Kilich grew up south of Kashgar and studied music at the Xinjiang Arts Institute. He performed with the guitar and dutar, and caught the attention of Uyghur pop star Erkin Abdullah who invited him to play in his band in Beijing. Now Amar teaches the dutar to young children at the Uyghur Culture Center in Fairfax.
Hayrunisa and Amar will teach their apprentices, Ajinur Setiwaldi and Subhinur Elemin, how to play the dutar, the two-stringed, long-neck lute quintessential to Uyghur traditional music as well as folk songs focused on “Uyghur lifeways, struggles, and the homeland.”
Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs and other mostly Turkic Muslims in the occupied East Turkestan, officially known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, have been detained by the Chinese government and forced to work or enter re-education camps. Heyrunisa’s former teacher, Abdurehim Heyt, was among many Uyghur artists and musicians detained for their “religious expression and ethnoreligious identity.” Fairfax is home to over 5,000 Uyghurs, the country’s largest Uyghur diaspora.
“Our hope is to contribute to the preservation of our culture and the resilience of our community by ensuring the transmission of our traditional musical heritage in the diaspora,” Amar said.
Community-Based Mural Making
Ellen Elmes (Jewell Ridge), Renee Wienecke (Cedar Bluff), and Jenna Taylor (Clintwood)
Ellen Elmes is muralist who has painted over forty indoor and outdoor murals in her career—some on her own, some in community with elementary, high school, and college students and some with community volunteers and professional artists.
Her murals are narratives based on collected stories of pride and remembrance of a given place. These large-scale public artworks also tend to incorporate elements of the local natural environment. Ellen is also an educator, serving as a longtime instructor at Southwest Virginia Community College and as a visiting artist in Tennessee and Virginia.
She will apprentice Renee Wienecke and Jenna Taylor in mural design development and painting, and their work will center on the restoration of “Echoes,” a collaborative mural Ellen completed in 2001 at the Jetty Baker Center in Clintwood (pictured above).
Renee works is a librarian for Tazewell County Public Libraries and is a self-taught painter. Jenna is a high school student in Clintwood, who was introduced to Ellen on the recommendation of her high school art teacher, Vicky Blevins, and Clintwood Mayor Danny Lambert. Over the course of the next year, Ellen, Renee and Jenna will meet some of the original contributors to “Echoes” and work on reproducing this beloved mural by hand on fabric panels so it may be enjoyed for generations to come.
