Richard Kurin B.A. '72 -Cultural impresario for the National Mall

National Mall is his stage

As director of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, Richard Kurin, B.A. ’72, is responsible for planning cultural events on one of the nation’s most public stages: the National Mall in Washington, D.C. “Basically, my role is to foster connections between different peoples and cultures for better understanding,” he says. “I bring people together.” He considers his work “living public anthropology,” and the National Mall is his stage.

His productions include the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, several presidential inaugural festivals, the Smithsonian’s 150th Anniversary, the Black Family Reunion, and America’s Millennium on the Mall. He has worked with such disparate figures as Yo-Yo Ma, the Aga Khan, the Dalai Lama, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and numerous others on projects to represent diverse American and world cultures. And for 2004, he is well into the planning three mega-events—a National Reunion in May to mark the opening of the new World War II Memorial with music of the era and veterans oral history, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in June and July featuring the cultural heritage of Haiti for its bicentennial of freedom, and a First Americans Festival in September to mark the opening of the new National Museum of the American Indian.

Preserving sound

In addition to planning high-profile cultural events, Kurin is also responsible for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which acquires old record companies and their original master tapes so that their recordings may continue to be published, and therefore preserved. Among such treasures are the recordings of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, the poetry of Langston Hughes, speeches of the Civil Rights era and 35,000 others. Kurin not only oversees the archives, but also releases recordings from new artists performing American folk, Latino, tribal, native, new immigrant and world music. “If you depended on major labels to put out these recordings, you’d never hear this stuff,” he says. Kurin points to this years’ Smithsonian Folkways Recordings “hits” as examples—cowboy poetry, jibaro music from Puerto Rico, capoeira music from Brazil, Ugandan Jewish music, Scottish songs and fiddle music, and Mali world music. He is also project director for “Save our Sounds,” an effort to preserve America’s Recorded Sound Heritage (music and other recordings) at the Smithsonian and Library of Congress supported by Hillary Clinton’s Save America’s Treasures program; and Smithsonian Global Sound, a music web-based project supported by the Rockefeller and Paul Allen foundations. Work on these and other projects has earned Academy, Emmy and Grammy awards for Kurin’s Center.

Kurin is also involved with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), an organization that was the brainchild of Eleanor Roosevelt after World War II, as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After leaving the organization in 1984, the U.S. recently rejoined. Kurin advised both UNESCO and the U.S. State Department on a new cultural treaty that encourages the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. This would help save languages, oral traditions and forms of folk knowledge around the globe. “It’s a good thing. We need to respect and protect the cultural heritage of the world’s people, especially given today’s threats due to rapid modernization, globalization, and armed conflict.”

UB the best

Kurin says “UB was the best school in the state in the late ’60s, and I expect it still is.” He was a “working class kid from Queens” whose father was a truck driver, and he recalls going to UB a “great opportunity.” Kurin entered UB in 1968 when the campus, and America, was in such turmoil, with demonstrations and cancelled classes. He remembers fondly faculty member Bob Denton, who encouraged him to do an independent study in India by helping the Museum of Natural History in New York City expand its collections. Others aided his work as a double major in philosophy and anthropology; and he credits a UB graduate student as being “the single-most influential person” in his decision to study anthropology. “He really made it click,” Kurin says. As well, he says, “the experience of going to India, and having an imperfect understanding, then coming back to UB and putting it all together again truly expanded my intellectual horizons.”

Another UB professor, Terrance Taetje, encouraged Kurin to apply to the University of Chicago graduate school, and even offered to help pay for the application – “that’s a UB professor for you!” Kurin says. He was accepted, and his family pooled money together for his first year, after which he earned a fellowship that covered costs. Kurin became a Fulbright Scholar and earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1981.

Kurin has since lived for years in India and Pakistan and visited more than 80 different countries in connection with his Smithsonian duties. He is the author of dozens of scholarly works and several books, including “Reflections of a Culture Broker: A View from the Smithsonian,” and “Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Culture Of, By, and For the People.” Kurin is also finishing a manuscript to be published in 2004 on the Hope Diamond, which “looks at the gem from a cultural historical point of view as a cursed stone, a symbol of power, wealth, and love, and currently a national treasure and pop icon.”

--Barbara A. Byers, APR

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