The Roland L. Freeman Gallery
Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 1 Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 2 Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 3 Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 4 Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 5 Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 6 Gallery 1: The Mississippi Folklife Project, Image 7

The Mississippi Folklife Project was an outgrowth of work done in 1973 for the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Annual Festival of American Folklife. Mississippi was to be a featured state of the 1974 Festival, and folklorist Worth Long and field-research photographer, Roland L. Freeman, were responsible for developing its African-American component. The Festival was such a success that Freeman and Long went back to the state to conduct the Mississippi Folklife Project, considered by many scholars to be the most important body of such work since that of folklorist/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
The first overview of this work was in a national touring exhibit (1977-1979) called Folkroots: Images of Mississippi Black Folklife, which was accompanied by a small catalog and several posters. Then, in 1981, the International Center for Photography (New York, NY) mounted Southern Roads/City Pavements: Photographs of Black Americans, an international touring exhibit of Freeman’s photos; its “Southern Roads” section draws primarily from this project.
All the images in this gallery are from the Mississippi Folklife Project.

Copies of inidividual prints from The Mississippi Folklife Project are available in the Online Catalog