about
An interdisciplinary collective practicing craft & expanding the grammar of ornament.
Folk Lounge is a contemporary craft collective founded by multidisciplinary artist and design leader Shagho that bridges ancestral ornamental traditions with urgent contemporary needs. Through contemplative craft circles held in public parks and collaborative programs with cultural institutions, Folk Lounge creates living spaces where traditional practices become responses to the crises of our time: nature deficit, digital overwhelm, cultural homogenization, and the erosion of intergenerational knowledge transmission.
At its heart, Folk Lounge operates on a simple but radical premise: that gathering to make beauty with our hands is not nostalgic recreation but essential cultural infrastructure. When participants step into a Folk Lounge circle—whether embroidering botanicals along the LA River, exploring tile-making traditions in neighborhood parks, or tracing silk routes through textile work in museum halls—they encounter something that "holds you," as founder Shagho describes it. "You understand why this was done for centuries."
The work sits at the intersection of cultural preservation, ecological awareness, and community building, treating traditions as seeds that need planting. Folk Lounge programs are grounded in ongoing scholarly research and engagement with museum collections including the Wende Museum, Pasadena History Museum, Pasadena Heritage, the Huntington, and global virtual archives across regions. This research foundation ensures that programs honor the deep histories and geographies embedded in ornamental practices while allowing for adaptive evolution that speaks to contemporary experience.
Folk Lounge name was inspired by the idea of bringing people together over many traditions of culture and expression of folklore in comfortable modern settings where we can explore and reinvent it for our needs today.mission
beauty is healing
Harmony works with our nature and ecosystems. We are wired to pursue things that make us feel inspired.
ornament is gate
We can explore culture, history, geography, politics, mythology & the human story through time across borders.
We need spaces where we can learn from different generations at once to be balanced & grounded in our experience of life in it’s vast experience.
cross-generational
nature is calling
It’s ready for us to return to land, to stories, to stewardship and co-creation with more than human world.
“ We're crafting a softer world where people can thrive.
Shagho
Founder & CEO at Folk Lounge
land
We recognize that the land we occupy today is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash peoples. We honor their elders, past, present, and emerging, for their continued stewardship of these lands, waters, and communities. We acknowledge the deep and lasting impacts of settler colonization, including the displacement, violence, and trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples, and commit to the ongoing work of truth, reconciliation, and healing. As we gather and create here, we are grateful for the opportunity to learn, grow, and live on these sacred lands, and we support the elevation of Indigenous voices and cultures.
Textile ✥ Illustration ✥ Craft ✥ Art
welcome to
Textile ✥ Illustration ✥ Craft ✥ Art welcome to
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dream it into being
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✿ ✿ ✿ ꕤ dream it into being ꕤ
UNESCO's Intangible Heritage
With newly developed cultural instruments UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has expanded it's mission to intangible heritage which now includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.
"An understanding of the intangible cultural heritage of different communities helps with intercultural dialogue, and encourages mutual respect for other ways of life. An important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization."
The importance of intangible cultural heritage is not the cultural manifestation itself but rather the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next. The social and economic value of this transmission of knowledge is relevant for minority groups and for mainstream social groups within a State, and is as important for developing States as for developed ones.
UNESCO's 2024 survey reveals that 62% of artists and culture professionals worldwide receive poor or no protection of their economic and social rights—a striking indicator of the fragility of intangible heritage transmission. This vulnerability is reflected in global heritage expenditure, which varies dramatically from $1 to over $515 per capita across reporting nations, underscoring vast disparities in how communities resource cultural preservation. In response to these challenges, UNESCO launched the 2025 Framework for Cultural Statistics at MONDIACULT 2025, establishing new methodologies to measure not just culture's economic contributions, but its social value—recognizing that the true worth of living traditions lies in the knowledge transmission itself, and the communities who sustain it.
We stand at the threshold of the emergence of a new cultural commons—one that centers the practitioners, values social impact alongside economic contribution, and recognizes living heritage as essential infrastructure for resilient communities.
LA County's OurCounty Vision
Folk Lounge's practice directly advances OurCounty's vision by addressing culture as essential infrastructure for sustainable, equitable communities. By creating accessible gatherings in LA County's parks and public spaces, a call for recreational and cultural opportunities while modeling inclusive participation—for communities historically excluded from institutional arts spaces. The practice of contemplative embroidery in public spaces serves as what OurCounty identifies as critical: restorative environments that support community health and well-being. Folk Lounge's peer-to-peer learning model and intergenerational exchange distribute creative capacity throughout diverse communities, challenging the concentrated cultural power structures that mirror the economic inequities OurCounty seeks to address. By treating traditional craft knowledge as living practice rather than archived artifact, and by creating space for cultural synthesis across LA's diasporic communities, Folk Lounge contributes to what the plan calls "thriving" systems—not just ecological, but cultural ecosystems that need tending, adaptation, and equitable access. Folk Lounge's work suggests that cultural sustainability—the ability to gather, make, share knowledge, and belong—is inseparable from environmental and economic justice.
Folk Lounge works around the following themes and questions we hold, patterns we notice, and possibilities we're testing in real time. We offer them as contributions to a larger conversation about how we gather, make, and belong. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
COSMOS
The beauty of life is an eternal celebration. To adorn and decorate is to honor that magnificence—a harmony that extends beyond ourselves to encompass all life. This is the fairy tale frequency that resonates across cultures: timeless work that opens doors to universality, connecting us to the ecology, mythology, and cosmology of ancient peoples.
EMBODIED COGNITION
Hand intelligence and multi-sensory materiality engage capacities we've left dormant. Working with our hands expands our human range—not just what we can make, but what we can feel. These experiences ripple through the body, creating new pathways for understanding. How do we support emerging ways to reflect culture through the body and senses?
REVERSING TIME
Temporal spaces slow us down and ground us in a centered present, restoring nervous systems frayed by acceleration. Non-goal-oriented environments become regenerative when we honor restorative being alongside productive doing. Here, flow and oneness with life become possible. How do we protect and proliferate these rare pockets of slowness?
DREAMING
Through the prism of potentiality, all is possible when we keep turning the kaleidoscope—tasting new worlds and shaping taste itself. Cultural sustainability invites us to notice the subtle gaps in values around us, then build back what's been lost: healing practices, fluency in multiple ways of knowing, and imagination for what could be. What futures do we want to make inevitable?
FLUID LEARNING
Cross-generational pollination and peer-to-peer exchange distribute creative capacity throughout our community. Boundaries blur: teachers become students, experts remember being beginners, knowledge circulates rather than consolidates. We treat traditions as seeds that need planting and tending, not just archiving. How do we create conditions where everyone both teaches and learns?
PROPAGATION IN COMMUNITY
Reciprocity, diversity, learning—the sharing of stories, nature, recipes, regions, stitches, histories, and modes of thinking. All of this questions the static experience. Exploring the concept of the other and ourselves becomes a social experiment that softens us to contradiction: the good and bad within us and among our fellows. Together, we negotiate the values of the new world we're assembling. What do we want to propagate, and what do we want to compost?
REWILDING THE EYE
The call to the outdoors reconnects us with relationships, cycles, and landscapes that have always been there, waiting. In Strangers Love Doing Strange Things Together, the authors remind us how to explore cities with fresh eyes. We extend this practice to land itself—learning to see what we've stopped noticing, developing intimacy with place. How do we make communion with nature not occasional, but habitual?
PLACEMAKING
Gathering in public spaces, we develop memories for local landscapes and celebrate opportunities to meet our neighbors in facilities built for collective use. This is how we expand beyond the narrow channels of our individual lives while building respect for the places we inhabit. What does it mean to truly belong to a place, rather than simply occupy it?
ROOTS & WINGS
Our greatest gift to future generations is freedom to synthesize multiple inheritances into something authentic to their own experience. Living traditions must breathe—evolving through periods of blooming, migration, and disruption. This requires holding tension: honoring what was while making space for what will be. How do we pass down both the seeds and the permission to plant them differently?
NEW ECONOMIES
Previous eras of ornament are deeply colonial and Orientalist. On the other side, fear of cultural appropriation can freeze the playground of exchange. We find ourselves between extraction and paralysis, seeking a third way. What new terms, practices, methodologies, and leadership can help us arrive at more reciprocal creative futures? How do we build economies of respect, citation, and fair exchange around cultural knowledge?
founder
Shagho is a multidisciplinary design leader, artist, and cultural practitioner who works at the frontiers of innovation and community. As founder of Folk Lounge, facilitates cultural programming to study the grammar of ornament known for Embroidery Socials across LA parks to explore how traditional craft practices foster community, continue cultural preservation in contemporary urban settings, connect us with land and encourage being. Born in Vladivostok, of Armenian and Russian heritage, she holds a BS in Fashion Design and an MFA in Human-Computer Interaction from California College of the Arts. She believes in the power of collective making to weave new connections between past wisdom and future possibility.
“My vision for the folk lounge is to use embroidery as a vehicle for learning craft, ornament & skill that creates inner harmony, peace and a creative outlet, but also goes into deeper domains of our ancestry, our diversity as well unity. It connects us to land, lore, flora and fauna. Learning embroidery is also learning symbolism, legends, mythology and the creation stories of the world, as well as pulling in music and dance in celebration of life. “ - Shagho
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Folk Lounge plays with embroidery as a technology for thinking, creativity and joy. The combination of storytelling & technique really helps people connect with the universal need to express their experience.
Maya
Director, Public Programs
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I'd been wanting to embroider for personal projects for months but didn't know where to start. Joining Embroidery Social at Barnsdall Park was easy—I learned basic stitches while seeing more advanced possibilities based on the projects around me. I met some cool folks and discovered a new park too.
Jordan
First timer
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I've been practicing textile techniques on my own for many years. Working with Folk Lounge opened up a whole new side of cultural work I can engage with. It's given me a real pathway to work in cultural stewardship and get my practice out there.
Elizabeth
Textile artist