YouTube Spotlight: Feufollet

Last up on our Festival Artist Spotlight list is the young Cajun band Feufollet. Once hailed as the youthful and precocious future of Cajun music, Feufollet is one of the most popular and innovative Cajun bands in southwest Louisiana, despite the fact that most of the band members are college students. The band's music has deep traditional roots, with vocals in Cajun French, but the musicians don't hesitate to add more modern elements when they fit the music. Folklorist Nick Spitzer, the host of American Routes on NPR, describes Feufollet as "a beguiling mix of authoritative voice and youthful passion, seriousness of purpose and artistic risk-taking." Hear them in person at the Cityfolk Festival on this weekend.



This groove starts out with a country flair but turns straight into Cajun country.

Quilters Mix Tradition with Contemporary Art

by Sara Cogswell, Curator of "Threads of Evidence"

The quilts of Dayton resident Winifred Fiedler are undeniably traditionally rooted, but her bold colors and imaginative use of geometric forms also show the influence of contemporary painting and photography. As an artist, she has worked as both a quilter and photographer.

Fielder came late in life to the pursuit of art after a first “career” of community involvement while raising five children. She started quilting about 20 years ago.
Her work is in both corporate and private collections, some of it created as commissions. It has been shown throughout southwest Ohio at venues that include the Glen Helen Preserve, the Ohio State Fair, Springfield Art Museum, Cox Arboretum, Dayton Convention Center, and Dayton Visual Arts Center. Her king-size quilt, Outback, was reproduced in the magazine "Quilters Newsletter".

An equally fascinating fusion of traditional quilting, contemporary art, and performance art will be seen in the work of well-known textile artist Christina Pereyma. Based in Troy, Pereyma is known for her “fragile, non-functional garments, iconic textiles and poetic sculptures”, incorporating such materials as beeswax and eggshells, as well as a wide variety of fabrics and textile traditions. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Dayton Visual Arts Center and the Dayton Art Institute, as well as group shows in Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois and Washington, D.C.

Pereyma will be performing a work she calls “Yellow”, in which she uses a historic Davis treadle sewing machine (manufactured in Dayton by the company that evolved into the Huffy bicycle company) to quilt pieces of yellow satiny fabric which she has imprinted with the natural rust of steel implements. The printing process can take anywhere from two days to several weeks depending on the treatment of the fabric as well as the steel. “The quality of the surface of my materials is a primary concern, the confrontation of satin and rust.”

As a woman trained to use an electric sewing machine, maintaining the steady rhythm pumping the foot treadle requires a tremendous amount of concentration. “It is equally Zen and controlled frenzy.” She sees it as “a metaphor for life on earth, a constant forward motion in a rotational spin, hurling through space.”

Her performance and site-specific installation will progress and grow during the Festival and will take place in a small tent located by the Material Culture Stage. She will be giving an explanation of her piece at 2:00 pm on Sunday on the Material Culture stage.

YouTube Spotlight: Bela Fleck with Oumou Sangare and Her Band

Bela Fleck has done more than anyone to broaden the range and change the image of the banjo, recording everything from bluegrass and folk to jazz and classical. The nine-time Grammy winner went to Africa in 2005 for a recording project exploring the African roots of the banjo. He recorded in Mali, Gambia, Tanzania and Uganda with well-known musicians as well as local players he met on his travels. The result is Throw Down Your Heart, an extraordinary album and documentary film of the same title. For the Cityfolk Festival performance on July 4, Fleck will be reunited with the transcendent Oumou Sangare, a Malian singer who's known as the Songbird of Wassoulou and one of the biggest stars of West Africa. Her newest album, Seya, got glowing reviews from The New York Times reviewer Nate Chinen and from Milo Miles on NPR's Fresh Air.

Join Cityfolk at a FREE showing of the documentary Throw Down Your Heart on Wednesday, June 24 at 7:00 PM at the Neon Movies.

Trailer for the documentary:


Sample of a Throw Down Your Heart concert. These are not the musicians who will appear at the Cityfolk Festival.


Video of the title song on Oumou Sangare's newest album Seya

Family Fun at the 2009 Cityfolk Festival

Saturday and Sunday afternoons will feature big family fun and art-making action for kids of all ages! Best of all...nearly all of it is FREE and they get to take home one-of-a-kind souvenirs of the Festival.

At the Passport Stations, kids can "create their piece of peace." Each Station is a different stages of decorating and adorning a quilt square on the theme of building peace across Dayton. The squares will be joined to build a quilt over the span of the Festival.

Since the very first Festival, K12 Gallery for Young People has provided thousands of young people with a memorable work of art—Chinese gongs, velvet puppets, or shields and armor, for example—that they created all on their own. This year's activity will be a take-home mini quilt.

Puerto Rican artist Kenneth Melendez returns with mask-making activities and will lead a bilingual percussion workshop on Sunday evening.

The NCR Family Stage provides a more intimate venue where you can see many of our performers up close, enjoy quieter and family-oriented performances, and take part in workshops. Hear the intricate melodies of the Indian sitar, learn about the Celitc roots of bluegrass music, enjoy storytellers and more! At the Reynolds & Reynolds Dance Pavilion, you can learn Ceili Dancing with Nine-8ths Irish, breakin' ("breakdancing"), the basics of Brazilian Samba with Chicago Samba and contra dance moves with Kathy Anderson. For a complete schedule, click here.

Chicago Samba will lead a street parade on Saturday, street performers will make an appearance from time to time throughout the Festival site, and henna tattoos will be available for a small fee.

YouTube Spotlight: Nine-8ths Irish

Headquartered in Sacramento, California, the band Nine-8ths Irish has received a lot of attention within the traditional Irish music community since forming at the beginning of 2007. The all-instrumental quartet describes its style of music as “Irish and a wee bit more,” the wee bit coming from the bluegrass, old-time country music and jazz the band members had played before coming together to pursue their shared love of traditional Irish music. Armed with a vast repertoire of traditional tunes from Ireland (and also Scotland, Brittany, Cape Breton and the U.S.) and a smattering of sparkling originals, the band will perform at the Festival all three days.

Announcing the First Ever Festival Wrap Up Party!

Don't let the fun stop when the Festival ends! The first-ever Wrap Up Party is sure to be a highlight of the weekend and a great way to support Cityfolk.

The musical sounds of the 2009 Cityfolk Festival will last well into the night at the exclusive Wrap Up Party at Canal Street Tavern at 7:30 PM on Sunday, July 5. Be there for a special appearance by some of your Festival favorites in an intimate setting. Canadian acoustic ensemble The Duhks and bluegrass geniuses Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper are scheduled to appear. With so many other artists in town, who knows who will turn up and join in the jam!

In these hard economic times, corporate and government support is getting harder to find. We're asking for your help to keep the Festival free. $40 of your $50 Wrap Up Party ticket is tax-deductible.

To purchase your ticket, click here or call 937-496-3863.

Tickets will be sold on a first-come first-served basis, don't be left out -- get yours today!

Seeing Color, Music and Dance in our Latino-Styled Quilts

By Sara Cogswell, curator of "Threads of Evidence"

Material Culture exhibitor Soammy Feliciano-Hurst will be having a dialogue with regional quilt artist Cathy Jeffers on the Material Culture stage at the 2009 Cityfolk Festival during a session they have entitled, “Seeing Color, Music and Dance in our Latino-Styled Quilts”. Both quilters are of Puerto Rican heritage, and will both bring their unique cultural influences and vision to share with the festival audience.

Soammy Feliciano-Hurst was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Her mother taught her to sew when she was very little. She moved to Ohio in 1988 to pursue a master’s degree in Early Childhood, and it was not until then that she saw her first quilt while visiting a friend here in Ohio. Puerto Rico’s climate is such that there is no need for heavy blankets. However, Soammy was fascinated by quilting, and since she had been sewing since early in her life, decided that she would like to learn to quilt.

In her first fourteen years of quilting, she stayed with very traditional styles, mostly from patterns. She was “afraid to put too much color in her work”. Two years ago, she met Cathy Jeffers, a local artist as well as a co-worker in the education field. They were both Puerto Rican, and both loved their culture. Cathy’s passion to create incredible colorful pieces of art intrigued and sparked an interest in Soammy to be more creative in her own work. She began to think about “her people and culture”, and wanted to tell her story with her quilts.

Feliciano-Hurst’s favorite style of quilting is strip piecing. “Cutting hundreds of strips in different lengths and sizes gives me the freedom to create a picture, a story that reflects who I am as a Latino woman.” Often her quilts show the waves of the water in the ocean or a palm tree dancing among the sand dunes. “When I quilt, I feel empowered to imagine and to remember vivid memories that have shaped the person I am today.”

Cathy Jeffers is a prolific artist and quilter. Her collage and layering style of quilting is used to enhance the texture of her very narrative contemporary art quilts. One of her works is currently included in the prestigious Quilt National in Athens, Ohio, an annual international juried quilt exhibition.

YouTube Spotlight: The Duhks

Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, The Duhks have taken the acoustic music circuit by storm over the past decade with a fresh, unique and distinctive fusion of traditional and progressive bluegrass, Celtic music, North American folk, old-time country, soul, blues, gospel and lots more—the band has been called a “one-band music festival.” The band, which is also known for its environmental activism, has played most of the major North American music festivals, including Merlefest, Bonnaroo, Strawberry and Telluride. They will take the Main Stage by storm on Saturday.

YouTube Spotlight: The Afromotive

Based in Asheville, North Carolina, the Afromotive has become known as a “must see” band on the strength of powerhouse shows that blend horn-heavy Afrobeat with old school deep funk in a way that would make the ghosts of James Brown and Fela Kuti smile and dance. The band is led by singer and master drummer Adama Dembele, a 33rd-generation djembe player from the Ivory Coast who has performed with Salif Keita, Oumou Sangare and many others, giving Afromotive an authentic West African Afrobeat base upon which his American bandmates have built a polyrhythmic, multicultural dance party that adds touches of funk, jazz and improvisation to the African roots. Catch their groove in the Dance Pavilion on Friday and Saturday.