Join us in front of the Freer Gallery of Art for a variety of hands-on activities, demonstrations, and performances. Find out what participating organizations are presenting below:

DC Public Library Punk & Go-Go Archives
Live Audio Digitization—Learn about audio digitization and preservation with the library’s Tech Truck and Memory Lab. Bring your own tapes for digitization and walk away with a digital copy. Nico “The GoGo-ologist” Hobson will take listeners on a guided audio tour through an historical recording of a live go-go show.
Maker Table—Make your own zines, journals, and buttons using visual inspiration from the library’s punk and go-go collections.
Collections Table—Learn about the library’s efforts to document local music. Browse physical and digital collections and learn about upcoming music programs. If you have materials to donate to the collections, the library can accept them here.
Stories and Games—Bring your kids for storytime with a punk rock librarian and to learn musical games led by artist OnRaé LaTeal  and her Black Girls Hand Games Project.
Workshop—Join a percussion workshop led by Malik DOPE Drummer.
These activities are supposed by the DC Public Library Foundation.

Globe Collection and Press at MICA
Globe Poster Printing Corporation, historically one of the nation’s largest showcard printers, has been telling the story of American music and entertainment through bright and iconic posters since 1929. For decades, these iconic posters promoted both national acts and homegrown shows on the walls and posts of D.C. streets. Browse examples from their historic collection, reminisce about the shows you attended, and take home a postcard-size poster that Globe Collection and Press at MICA prints on site.

Anacostia Community Museum
For over fifty years, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum has engaged local communities in documentation projects, exhibitions, and programs. Come learn about the current Off-Site and In the City initiative as well as past research on D.C. school music programs, Banding Together: School Bands as Instruments of Opportunity. Join local artist Alma Robinson for music-themed hands-on activities making banjos, drums, and pop-up cards.

Mayor’s Office on African American Affairs
This division of the D.C. Mayor’s office engages the diverse African American communities of the city through through advocacy, capacity building, and community engagement. The office was created to highlight the rich cultural identity as well as focus its efforts in the areas of housing, health, education, employment, social services, public safety, and expanding business opportunities for African Americans in Washington, D.C. 

D.C. Office of Cable Television, Film, Music, and Entertainment
This office produces and broadcasts programming for the city’s public, educational, and government access cable channels and digital radio station; regulates the D.C.’s cable television service providers; provides customer service for cable subscribers; and supports a sustainable creative economy and labor market in the District of Columbia. Partnering with Georgetown University, the office has just launched the first ever D.C. Music Census, which seeks to gather information that will reveal challenges and opportunities and inform the growth of the local music ecosystem.
 

National Park Service
Staff from the Cultural Resources and Natural Resource Stewardship and Science divisions are on hand to share information about their research and programming initiatives, which include music-related topics, such as the popular Summer in the Parks. Running from 1968 to 1976, this program directly contributed to local music scenes—providing performing opportunities for young go-go and punk artists. Some sites continue to present iconic summer music series, including Fort Reno and Fort Dupont. Reminisce about your past music experiences at local national parks and learn about what’s coming up this summer at the Anacostia Park Late Skates, Music at the Monument, and Fort Dupont, among other sites. 

Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives with the DC Oral History Collaborative
The Rinzler Archives of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage contains thousands of audio recordings, photos, and moving images documenting D.C. local culture and communities, including over fifty years of Smithsonian Folklife Festival performances. Learn about these resources and how to access them. Record your own five-minute D.C. music memory—a story about the role of music in your life or a notable music experience in the city. This audio recording, facilitated by the DC Oral History Collaborative, will become part of the Rinzler Archives.
 
The DC Oral History Collaborative, established in 2016 as a partnership project of the Historical Society of Washington, DC, HumanitiesDC, with the DC Public Library as the sponsoring agency, responds to a growing need to preserve unrecorded Washington history by making existing oral history recordings more accessible and giving residents the training and resources they need to conduct quality interviews.

Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives, University of the District of Columbia
Named for radio pioneer Felix E. Grant whose career on D.C.’s airwaves spanned five decades, this collection houses commercial sound recordings, interviews, recordings of radio programs, books, periodicals, photographs, ephemera, and correspondence related to all aspects of jazz, with a special focus on jazz in Washington, D.C. Learn about the holdings of this valuable local archives, how to access its resources, and current projects underway. 

Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, University of Maryland
The music, theatre, and dance materials of this library include circulating, reference, and serial collections, consisting of books, musical scores, periodicals, as well as audio and video recordings. Learn about the breadth of these resources—and specifically about the Washington, D.C., Punk and Indie Fanzine collection (DCPIFC) of the archives, which documents the publications created by fans and participants in local music scenes that have thrived in the area since the late 1970s. 

#DontMuteDC—Don’t Mute The Movement
The #dontmutedc uprising that began with a springtime battle over music and public space has morphed into an urgent public conversation about gentrification, culture, history, and racial disparities in education, healthcare, criminal justice, and public safety. Go-go music has given a voice to these issues and inspired many longtime Washingtonians to renew their ongoing fight to enjoy the prosperity washing over the city. Join the conversation about cultural preservation, fighting for peace and against displacement, and a more equitable city with cultural scholar Natalie Hopkinson, peace activist Ronald “Mo” Moten, #dontmutedc hashtag creator Julien Broomfield, music producer Tone P, and Metro PCS store owner Donald Campbell. At 4:30 p.m. , they present a go-go musical showcase of “The Royal Pocket Tour,” featuring veteran artists from several iconic bands.

Local Record Market
Independent record labels have long been a staple of the D.C. music scene—controlling the terms and keeping local the means of producing their music. This market offers the rare opportunity to shop in person a selection of these local catalogs and meet the people behind the labels that typically operate only as mail-order retail. Participating labels: Carpark, Crooked Beat, Dischord, Electric Cowbell, Free Dirt Records & Service Co, Lovitt Records, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, This Could Go Boom. 

Crown Vic and Area Woman’s Weird World Record Party (Noon–4 p.m.)
Lace up your dancing shoes or pull up a bench and enjoy some selections of music from around the world and across time etched into vinyl records. Local artists and producers Jim Thomson and Eliza Childress take you on a romp through a universe of varied regional music styles from ethnic classics, olde world curios, and groovers from Washington, D.C., and beyond. 

DC Bluegrass Union Jam (2–4 p.m.)
Bring your instruments and join the D.C. Bluegrass Union for an open jam! Washington, D.C., has had a significant bluegrass underground since the late 1940s. Over the last two decades, it has been undergoing a renaissance, and DC Bluegrass Union has contributed to supporting and promoting the music locally. For this lively, interactive jam: we ask that jammers leave songbooks, sheet music, tablets, phones, and other visual aids at home. Bluegrassers communicate during jams and performances by looking at each other and focusing on the spirit of non-verbal communication.

Go-Go Performance: The Royal Pocket Tour (4:30–5 p.m.)
“The pocket” is the drumbeat that survived the hellish transatlantic slave trade and continues to be used to communicate in many of the District of Columbia’s black neighborhoods. In the “Royal Pocket,” three legendary go-go conga players will perform a special selection celebrating black resilience and strength—400 years since the first enslaved Africans landed in Jamestown, Virginia. Hosted by Ronald Moten and Natalie Hopkinson on the National Mall across from the Freer Gallery of Art.