The 2023 New Jersey Folk Festival will occur as part of the campus-wide Rutgers Day on Saturday, April 29, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
This year’s NJFF theme is “New Directions in Folk.” Organizers say the event is designed to bring “tradition and social justice into conversation with the present, the future, and the avant-garde.”
Rutgers Day is an extension of the success of Cook College’s Ag Field Day and the New Jersey Folk Festival, events that have been held for years on adjoining campuses in New Brunswick.
The first Ag Field Day was held more than 100 years ago in August, 1906; it was later rescheduled to be celebrated on the last Saturday in April.
Rutgers professor Angus Gillespie launched the first New Jersey Folk Festival in 1975 with a team of Douglass College students completing a for-credit college course in running a folk festival.
“In those first few years I was largely focused on Southern New Jersey,” says Gillespie, “because that was the more traditional, agricultural part of the state. After a few years I was meeting with a few of my peers and they said to me: ‘Are you going just do southern New Jersey over and over again? There’s a rich folklore load in central and northern New Jersey.’ ”
In the early 1980s he and his students switched their focus to honor various ethnic groups each year. Over the years that list has included Native Americans, Filipinos, Irish, Scottish, Hungarian Americans, and many other groups.
“We’ll never run out of ethnic groups to honor at the festival,” Gillespie says.
After 46 years of continually being on-site at Woodlawn on the Douglass campus on the last Saturday in April, last year was the first time Gillespie took a break from it all.
He has left the Folk Festival in the capable hands of two American studies professors: Maria Kennedy and Carla Cevasco.
The first Rutgers Day was held in 2009. At this Saturday’s Rutgers Day, the public, alumni and students may take buses to any of the campuses and visit any department in New Brunswick or Piscataway.
Admission is free for both Rutgers Day and the New Jersey Folk Festival.
For more information on the New Jersey Folk Festival: www.njfolkfest.org.
For more on Rutgers Day: newbrunswick.rutgers.edu/rutgers-day.
