Arkansas Living Treasures

A fiddle tune learned from a father. A pottery wheel turning beneath the hands of three generations. White oak split and woven into a basket. A canoe carved with knowledge carried thousands of miles from the Marshall Islands to Northwest Arkansas.

These are more than beautiful objects crafted by skilled hands. They are pieces of culture, history and community, kept alive because someone still knows how to make them, play them and, perhaps most importantly, teach someone else.

Since 2002, the Arkansas Living Treasures Award program has recognized master artists who preserve the state’s traditional crafts and folk arts. Potters, quilters, bladesmiths, basket makers, wood-carvers, weavers and musicians are among those honored, each carrying knowledge that could easily disappear if it isn’t practiced and passed down.

And perhaps the most important word in the program’s name is living.

What Is the Arkansas Living Treasures Program?

The Arkansas Living Treasure Award began with an Arkansas bladesmith. After Jerry Fisk of Nashville was named a National Living Treasure in 1999, he realized Arkansas lacked a similar way to recognize its master traditional artists. He approached state heritage leaders with the idea, and in 2002, the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Heritage Department established the Arkansas Living Treasure Award program.

What began primarily as recognition has grown into something larger.

Today, the program recognizes and supports masters of traditional crafts and folk arts whose work reflects the history, culture, and traditions of Arkansas communities. Since 2024, recipients also receive a $5,000 award intended to support the artist and the continuation of their craft.

Traditional does not mean creativity stops. A quilter might design her own pattern. A basket maker can develop a new shape. Yet the foundation remains rooted in skills, materials and methods connected to a community and its history; Arkansas’ history.

 How Does Someone Become an Arkansas Living Treasure?

Living Treasures are first recognized by those around them. Friends, family members, neighbors, students, co-workers and community members submit nominations. Nominees then provide information about their work, portfolio materials, and an original example for an independent panel to review.

Mastery matters, but so does continuation and representation for perpetuity.

A Living Treasure must have spent 10 years mastering a traditional craft or folk art and be actively perpetuating it. That doesn’t necessarily mean teaching in a classroom or academic setting. It might happen through apprenticeships, family and generational education, quilting circles, community workshops or simply by continuing to practice a skill in a setting where others can learn alongside them.

In 2018, only five people were nominated. For the 2026 award, 25 people were nominated, and 23 advanced through the process. Arkansas Arts Council leaders hope that number continues to grow, particularly as more rural communities recognize that the people quietly practicing these traditions are artists worth celebrating.

Meet a Few Arkansas Living Treasures

More than two decades of honorees demonstrate just how broad Arkansas folk arts can be.

Tim Trawick: Teach It

The 2026 Arkansas Living Treasure, Tim Trawick of Greenbrier, embodies a tradition you hear rather than hold.

Trawick is a third-generation Arkansas fiddle player who grew up playing with his father, the 1979 Arkansas Old Time State Fiddle Championship winner. He later taught his own sons and hundreds of other musicians across Arkansas and the region. Three of his students have won the top prize at the Arkansas Old Time State Fiddle Championship.

For more than 40 years, Trawick has performed, mentored, and taught, helping preserve the distinctive Ozark fiddle-playing style. His legacy isn’t simply the music he has played. It is the music that will continue to be played because he taught someone else.

Liton Beasa: Carry It With You

Liton Beasa of Springdale, the 2024 recipient, demonstrates that Arkansas folk traditions aren’t limited to those that originated here.

Beasa learned traditional Marshallese canoe carving as a child and was building canoes independently by age 26. He moved to Arkansas in 2013, bringing that knowledge to a state now home to the largest Marshallese population outside the Marshall Islands.

His construction of traditional wooden outrigger canoes has become an opportunity for cultural exchange, education and community gathering in Northwest Arkansas. He has collaborated with organizations such as the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History and Crystal Bridges to share the craft.

Sometimes preserving a tradition means carrying it with you and finding a new community where it can endure.

Image from Dryden Pottery.

James “Kimbo” Dryden: Hand It Down

For Kimbo Dryden of Hot Springs, pottery is a family language. His father, Jimmy Dryden, founded Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs in 1956. Kimbo grew up with his hands in clay, spending more than 40 years as a professional potter and becoming the 2022 Arkansas Living Treasure.

Then another generation stepped up to the wheel. Kimbo’s son Zack continued the family’s pottery tradition, creating a three-generation line of Arkansas makers. Their work even incorporates Arkansas itself, using novaculite and quartz in clay and glazes.

When Kimbo was honored, Arts Council staff remembered an unassuming master who could pull a vase from clay in moments during an on-site demo at his reception, a skill that looked effortless only because he’d practiced it for most of his life.

Image of carving by Longhua Xu.

Longhua Xu: Bring It and Share It

Longhua Xu brought his tradition to Arkansas from China. The classically trained artist immigrated to the United States in 1989 and settled in Hot Springs in 1990. He became an integral part of the city’s arts community, teaching students, mentoring artists, and creating work that became part of the community around him.

Xu was named the 2019 Arkansas Living Treasure for his masterful woodcarving and his commitment to sharing his knowledge.

His story expands the idea of Arkansas heritage. A tradition doesn’t have to originate here to become part of our story. It can arrive with a new Arkansan, be shared with neighbors and students, and eventually become woven into the culture of the place they now call home.

Image courtesy of CALS, provided by Alan DuBois.

Leon Niehues: Let It Evolve

In the woods near Huntsville, Leon Niehues found both the materials and inspiration for his craft.

The 2005 Arkansas Living Treasure taught himself basket making while pursuing a back-to-the-land lifestyle in rural Northwest Arkansas. Using young white oak harvested near his Ozark home and traditional splint-basket techniques, Niehues began creating baskets that later evolved into striking contemporary forms.

His work demonstrates another important truth about preservation: keeping a traditional craft alive doesn’t require keeping it unchanged. The old knowledge can become the foundation for something new.

 Experience Arkansas Folk Arts for Yourself

You don’t need to be a master artist to help preserve traditional craft. Across Arkansas, there are opportunities to watch, learn, listen, and put your hands to work.

• Visit Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View: Watch more than 20 working artisans demonstrate pottery, blacksmithing, weaving, quilting, woodcarving, broom making, and other traditional skills in the Craft Village.
• Become an apprentice: Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts partners with the Arkansas Arts Council to support mentor artists and apprentices who seek to carry cultural traditions forward.
• Explore the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock: See traditional Arkansas crafts in the museum’s collections and watch living-history demonstrations that connect objects to the people and skills behind them.

• Learn bladesmithing at the James Black School in Washington: Located at Historic Washington State Park, the school offers hands-on classes in bladesmithing, forging, and other historic trades.
• Attend James Black’s Bowie Heritage Festival: The annual April festival in Washington features bladesmithing demonstrations, competitions, living history, and traditional Arkansas crafts.
• Discover Ozark Folkways: The Winslow organization keeps Ozark traditions alive through workshops, fiber arts, music and community programming.

• Visit the Makers Corner at the Arkansas Folklife Festival: This annual event showcases music, lectures, and a makers’ alley where traditional folk artists show and sell their crafts.
• Start close to home: County fairs, 4-H programs and local Extension offices remain among the easiest places to learn sewing, food preservation, fiber arts and other skills that have been passed down through Arkansas communities for generations.
• Get involved in your county fair: It’s fair season, and many of the home economics and craft trades involve creating your own entries using traditional craft and folk-art methods.

Arkansas is also creating new opportunities through community workshops, festivals, teaching-artist programs, and the Arkansas Folklife Festival. The goal isn’t simply to remember how Arkansans once made things. It is to create opportunities for people to keep making them.

 Keeping Arkansas Traditions in Living Hands

As life becomes increasingly digital, an interesting trend is emerging. Traditional crafts are finding new audiences. Young people are gathering for crochet and craft nights.

Cross-stitching is being taken up by new hands. Thrifted objects are valued partly for the stories they carry. People want to know who made something, where it came from, why it matters, and how it connects to their personal story. Arts leaders see this renewed interest as a desire for something tactile and for a connection to history, land and something bigger than ourselves.

That may be exactly why Arkansas Living Treasures matter.

A treasure isn’t only something valuable enough to be protected behind glass.

Sometimes it is a person who remembers which wood to choose, how hot to build the fire, where to place the fingers on the fiddle, how the clay should feel, or how their grandparents taught them to make something. And, if we’re fortunate, they’ll teach it to the next generation.

 

Unless otherwise noted, images throughout story were used with permission from the Arkansas Departments of Parks, Heritage and Tourism.