Puerto Rico Distillery
“Puerto Rican Born. Maryland Made.” That’s the motto of Puerto Rico Distillery, a family-run business from Frederick, Maryland, led by father and daughter Angel and Crystal Rivera. Angel was born on the island but serving in the Navy brought him to Maryland, where the business he founded with Crystal belongs to the Maryland Distillers Guild and the American Distillers Institution....
Rosie Bowen & Adriana Bowen-Herrera
Owner of Rose’s Bakery in Baltimore’s Northeast Market, Rosie Bowen is the keeper of family recipes and foodways traditions for Baltimore’s Lumbee community. Bowen learned to cook her family’s traditional dishes primarily from her grandmother Pearl Bowen, a community leader and one of the oldest living Lumbee tribal members in Maryland before passing away at the age of 104. Lumbee...
Split Acres Maple
Shaun Broadwater oversees 19,000 maple tree taps on the property he owns and leases. Growing up on the family farm helping to raise livestock and dairy, maple was a new venture for teenage Broadwater. Finding maple trees on the farm, he decided to try his hand at making maple syrup. That first batch was a disaster, burning everything–including the pans....
Black Women’s Hair: Salisbury Style
Tahlia McLendon braids hair for a living, a professional calling rooted in family, regional, and cultural history. In the 1500s, braids were a mode of communication between African societies. Hair style also communicated details about an individual’s identity, such as marital status and beliefs. Though some see haircare today as a form of fashionx or vanity, it actually remains a...
Charm City Junction
Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Charm City Junction honors the sounds of its namesake town while also pushing their roots music to new frontiers. Founded in 2014, the ensemble is a quartet of next-generation virtuoso musicians, including Patrick McAvinue (fiddle), Sean McComiskey (button accordion), Alex Lacquement (upright bass), and Brad Kolodner (clawhammer banjo). The band members, drawing from distinct backgrounds of...
Gerdan
Amid the ongoing existential threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty and identity, Ukrainian cultural traditions stand as a rebuttal to the Russian incursion, and a testament to its distinctive culture. Representing Washington D.C.’s sizable Ukrainian community, Gerdan is mounting its own determined response, through music, dance, relief efforts, and community resolve. Gerdan was co-founded by Andrei Pidkivka, a Ukrainian immigrant residing in...
Janice Greene & Naomi Reid
For Janice Greene, telling stories is larger than narrating tales or reenacting characters; rather, it is to call on collective memory, ancestral identity, and a sense of humanity and resilience. Embracing the griot tradition, Janice has been telling stories of Black ancestors and ancestry for over 25 years. As she regards it, Blackstorytelling (one word, not two) is the art...
Karen Ashbrook & Chao Tian
Karen Ashbrook and Chao Tian connect East and West through the sounds of the hammered dulcimer. Part of the stringed instrument family, it is named for the technique musicians use to play it—instead of plucking the strings, they strike them with small hammers. Similarly played instruments are common worldwide; it is prevalent in the United States largely as a key...
Maryland Spirituals Initiative Ensemble
The birthplace of both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Maryland’s Eastern Shore occupies a unique place in the African American struggle for freedom. The rich, deeply moving African American spirituals tradition was also central to that search. These histories are celebrated and brought back to life through a recent exhibit and musical collaboration organized by the Water’s Edge Museum in...
Maryland WERKS
“You better WORK!”, the phrase popularized by the indomitable RuPaul as a song’s refrain, has become a universal anthem for drag performers. The practice of dressing up in ornate fashion, donning robust makeup, and using exaggerated cis-gender female signifiers in performance–a lot of work, indeed–has been seen across many cultures long before RuPaul’s song topped the charts in the early...
