Established in 2024

Timeline

Folk Lounge is a contemporary craft collective founded by multidisciplinary artist and design leader Shagane Sargsyan 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 Shagane 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 rather than artifacts to be preserved behind glass. 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.

Into the Woods: The Invitation to Deep Time

Folk Lounge's pedagogy rejects the false binary between rigid preservation and thoughtless appropriation, instead cultivating what might be called "cultural composting"—the understanding that traditions bloom, migrate, adapt through trauma and disruption, and are continually remade by each generation of practitioners. The oak doesn't strive to be an oak; it simply unfolds according to its nature. Similarly, Folk Lounge participants are invited to trust their senses, follow the thread into unknown territories, and discover how ancestral practices might address their own lived questions.

This approach opens doors to the mythology, ecology, and cosmology of ancient cultures—what some might call the collective unconscious or the "more-than-human world." Through hand-work, participants access what Shagane calls "the Fairy Tale vibration," a portal to embodied ways of knowing that our screen-saturated culture has nearly extinguished.

The Rewilded Eye: Perception as Practice

Working with traditional crafts fundamentally changes how we see. Thread color work rebuilds our capacity to notice subtle variations in the world around us—activating what Folk Lounge calls "color fluency." The rewilded eye notices relationships, variations, and particularities essential for ecological awareness. This is not abstract theory but lived experience: participants report that after Folk Lounge sessions, their daily environments appear transformed, richer, more worthy of attention and care.

Complex handwork activates neural pathways that screen-based tasks cannot reach, engaging what scientists call "embodied cognition"—intelligence distributed throughout our nervous system rather than centralized in the rational mind. In Folk Lounge circles, this manifests as a "multisensory renaissance": the feel of fiber, the planning of color, the sounds and smells of outdoor making, the diversity of stories and modes of thinking that emerge when we meditate in the body rather than the head.

Bridging and Breaking: The SocialAlchemy

Folk Lounge gatherings serve as laboratories for what Shagane calls "bridging and breaking"—softening us to the contradictions within ourselves and our communities while exploring concepts of otherness through discovering new stitches, cultures, traditions, and histories. These are spaces of "necessary utterance," where participants negotiate community values and collectively assemble the new worlds they want to inhabit.

The programs employ what Folk Lounge terms "fluid learning," deliberately blurring boundaries between teachers and students, experts and beginners. A child might show an elder how to incorporate contemporary themes while the elder shares techniques refined over decades—creating living archives that evolve rather than calcify. This distributed model of creative capacity counters the extractive logic that centralizes knowledge in designated "talented" individuals, instead cultivating what might be called creative commons where knowledge circulates freely.

Place Attachment and Public Space Activation

By situating craft circles in public parks rather than private studios, Folk Lounge makes both a practical statement about accessibility and a philosophical one about craft's relationship to landscape. Regular gatherings in these spaces develop emotional bonds with local environments, fostering stewardship and care for urban landscapes typically overlooked. Participants learn to face their neighbors with open hearts, to celebrate the opportunities and facilities already present in their communities, and to practice what Folk Lounge calls "placemaking"—the art of respectful inhabitation.

This outdoor orientation also reconnects craft to seasonal cycles and ecological rhythms. In an era of climate-controlled interiors and artificially lit workspaces, Folk Lounge's park-based practice offers what Shagane describes as "reversing time"—creating temporal spaces to slow down, work to a longer present, and restore depleted nervous systems through oneness with nature, land, and ecology.

Roots and Wings: Cultural Adaptation for Future Generations

Folk Lounge's vision for cultural transmission rejects the fantasy of "unaltered preservation," recognizing that the most vital gift to future generations is freedom to synthesize multiple inheritances into something authentic to their own experience. This is especially relevant for the emerging generation of makers—often of mixed heritage, navigating complex relationships to traditions that may feel simultaneously theirs and not-theirs.

The collective's work addresses what Shagane calls "the new economies"—moving beyond colonial and orientalist relationships to ornament toward something more playful and generous. "If I feel safe, I don't worry about appropriation," she explains. "We are kids playing in the playground of life." This requires new curriculum materials, multi-disciplinary approaches, distributed learning through social media and peer education circles, and leadership training for a generation facing unprecedented cultural change.

Cultural Stewardship in Practice

Folk Lounge operates as more than a workshop provider; it functions as cultural infrastructure for community resilience. Through partnerships with museums, libraries, arts commissions, design conferences, and corporate environments, the collective demonstrates how traditional practices address contemporary crises without being heavy-handed. The loneliness epidemic, ecological disconnection, cultural homogenization, and digital overload are all subtly countered through the simple act of gathering to create with hands.

Programs are designed with trauma-informed facilitation, attention to neurodivergent and sensory processing differences, consciousness of colonial histories, and multiple entry points for diverse learning styles. The emphasis is always on "beingness over doingness"—creating non-goal-oriented spaces where participants can practice loving their own presence without productivity metrics or output pressure.

The Living Tradition

Folk Lounge's tagline, "Because it was done forever everywhere," captures both the universality of ornamental practice and its continuous evolution. From collaborative community art projects to public space activation, specialized technique workshops to cross-disciplinary collaborations with environmental and cultural organizations, Folk Lounge tends what it calls "threadlines"—weaving connection through craft and community, person to person, generation to generation, culture to culture.

In an age of consumption and disassociation, Folk Lounge offers propagation and presence. It treats participants not as consumers of heritage but as cultural stewards capable of carrying forward living traditions. And in doing so, it opens a pathway back to what has sustained human communities for millennia: the deliberate, joyful, essentially human act of making beauty together.