A Cornucopia of Folk Arts’ Rich Heritage : Culture: Two L.A. artists are among this year’s NEA National Heritage honorees. Past winners’ works go on display today.

A Cuban drummer beats out rhythms with his hands at a bata religious ceremony honoring African spiritual forces. . . .

* A Mexican woman makes coronas , or crowns, for young girls’ coming-of-age parties by dipping folded paper into candle wax. . . .

* A Greek musician blows into a tsabouna , a bagpipe-like instrument that is literally a beheaded goat turned inside out. . .

They are not exotic attractions on a world tour but folk artists in places such as Manhattan Beach; Nyssa, Ore., and Tarpon Springs, Fla.

Artists such as these--including two in Los Angeles this year--are honored annually as National Heritage Fellows by the National Endowment for the Arts. Some previous winners will have their work on display starting today at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. The talents of this year’s two Los Angeles winners--bongo drummer Francisco Aguabella and bonsai designer John Naka--can be seen elsewhere.

An Afro-Cuban drummer from Manhattan Beach, Aguabella plans to use part of the $5,000 NEA grant to purchase several drums from Cuba, the native country he left in 1953. Since then, Aguabella has continued both sacred and secular Afro-Cuban musical traditions in performances around the United States. He’ll be at the Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood Thursday through Sunday nights.

“It’s a big thing to me,” Aguabella said of the award. “I’ve never been recognized in this way.”

Continuing a Japanese tradition, Naka, 78, of Whittier, began seriously to sculpt bonsai trees after he was released from a World War II internment camp.

Considered a meditative art (used in solitude to better oneself), bonsai sculpting has been for Naka a way to blend American and Japanese cultures.

“The Japanese now tell me, ‘You have an American way of doing bonsai.’ I’m very happy to hear that,” Naka said. “If you copy, that’s not real art. You have to re-create something with local color. I tell people you don’t have to look at Japan.”

Naka’s work is on display at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., where a viewing pavilion has been named after him. Naka’s bonsai trees will also be shown Aug. 8 and 9 at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles.

In 1982, the NEA began to highlight about a dozen artists and performers each year who practice traditional art. Nominated by their peers, the National Heritage Fellows receive a one-time-only grant presented during annual ceremonies in Washington.

Although likened to Japan’s “Living Treasures” program, the NEA’s folk art award grapples with America’s culturally diverse environment, said Dan Sheehy, the NEA’s folk art program director. Unlike the prestigious Japanese award, the NEA’s folk art program doesn’t support the artist for life.

“We don’t say, this person is the best,” Sheehy said. “We say this person is one of the best. We try to recognize the tradition more than the individual.”

The traveling exhibition opening here today was organized in 1988 by the Museum of International Folk Art, a unit of the Museum of New Mexico, and is the first time the works of Heritage fellows have been shown together.

Coinciding with the July 4 holiday, this exhibition, titled “America’s Living Folk Tradition,” gives new meaning to the concept of melting pot by, for example, simultaneously showing the efforts of a Czech-American egg painter, a cowboy poet and a German-American bobbin-lace-making nun.

Among the works, museum-goers are asked to write on blackboards, their thoughts on what exactly is American. The question is even harder to answer in this setting, for what does a Hmong weaver have in common with an Irish-American step dancer? South Carolina African-American baskets share a case with New Jersey-made wild fowl decoys. Eskimo masks are juxtaposed with Hispanic religious wood carvings.

The museum will also show videos of performing artists such as Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks, Cambodian dancer Peou Khatna and Black Creole accordion player Alphonse (“Bois Sec”) Ardoin.

“We’re trying to get people to look at the exhibition and think about who really is an American,” said Marcia Page, director of exhibition development at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. “Traditional folk art doesn’t only mean old stuff or rural, white America.”

This passing of traditions is invisible to most of the white middle class, said Steve Siporin, a folklore professor at Utah State University whose book on the National Heritage Fellows, “American Folk Masters,” has just been published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

“No group is privileged to be the ethnic group. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are a group too. The storytellers from Appalachia continue the Anglo-Saxon tradition,” Siporin said.

Like Aguabella, four of this year’s 13 fellows were born outside the United States, although award winners must be permanent U.S. residents. Sheehy cites the latest U.S. Census figures that foreign-born residents, at about 20 million according to the 1990 Census, are at an all-time high.

The numbers underline the fact that this is mostly a country of immigrants, said Sheehy.

“People who are examining who I am and how do I fit into the American mosaic do that examining through the arts,” Sheehy said. “We look at multiculturalism very literally--the multiplicity of cultural threads that make up the American fabric.”

In fact, the United States has become a cultural bank for fragile traditions from other countries. For example, after the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Cambodian musicians and dancers who left Cambodia went to France and the United States. The new Cambodian government has recently asked those who left to come back to help set up a conservatory.

Unlike recent immigrants to the United States, some folk artists have never seen the country from where their families and art come. A Kansas woman, Kepka Belton, whose work is included in the folk art show here, is a Czech egg-painter who has yet to visit Czechoslovakia where her family left four generations ago. Taught Czech design by her maternal grandmother, Belton keeps a link to her past with art.

“In every Czech village, there is one woman who’s the ‘egg lady.’ I guess around here, I’m it,” says Belton, who was a National Heritage Fellow in 1988.

Making folk artists stars of sorts with awards like the National Heritage Fellowship may be the only way to keep some dying traditions alive, said folk historian Siporin.

“We know that not only are we destroying our environment, but we are destroying our own cultures,” Siporin said. “We have to compete with television and movies to say this stuff is important.”

The “America’s Living Folk Traditions” exhibition runs through Sept. 6 at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, fourth floor in the May Company, Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Information: (213) 937-5544.