Home   >   What We Do   >   Museum on Main Street (MoMS)

Museum on Main Street (MoMS)

"New Harmonies" exhibit in Danville, IL - April 2010"New Harmonies" exhibit in Danville, IL - April 2010Museum on Main Street (MoMS), a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, offers high-quality traveling exhibitions to small museums, libraries, and historical societies in Illinois towns with populations of 25,000 or less, or by invitation.

  • New Harmonies: Now open in Centralia until August 29th
  • The Way We Worked: Coming to Illinois in Fall 2011. Applications due August 31. Apply now.
  • See photos of Museum on Main Street exhibitions (Updated June 2, 2010 with photos from "New Harmonies" in Carmi)

MoMS combines the prestige of Smithsonian exhibitions, the program expertise of state humanities councils, and the remarkable volunteerism and unique histories of rural communities to produce novel ventures in the public humanities. Exhibitions developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) rarely travel to locations that MoMS can reach.  Moreover, through the Illinois Humanities Council, select communities build the capacity to develop and deliver first-rate public programs.

"Journey Stories" in Monmouth. Photo by Jim De Young."Journey Stories" in Monmouth. Photo by Jim De Young.MoMS serves rural communities by circulating Smithsonian exhibitions that focus on broad topics relating to national history. The Illinois Humanities Council helps small museums and historical societies prepare exhibition-related events for and about their communities. The museum benefits from the project's professional training in volunteerism, exhibition development, fundraising, marketing, and interpretation of local history. Through these combined resources, Museum on Main Street sparks lasting professional improvement for small town cultural organizations.

New Harmonies Touring Schedule

New Harmonies is a cultural history of America's musical landscape. It's the story of a diverse mix of people interacting with theNew World, a world where cultures and customs met, mixed, and mingled and created new sounds. The distinct cultural identities of all of these peoples are carried in song -- both sacred and secular -- and the music that emerges is known by names like blues, country, western, folk, and gospel. This exhibition tracks the unique history of many peoples reshaping each other into one incredibly diverse and complex people - Americans. It also promises a fascinating, inspiring, and toe-tapping listen to the American story of cultural exchange with its multimedia components. As a unique traveling exhibition, it is full of surprises about familiar songs, histories of instruments, the roles of religion and technology in shaping new sounds, and the continuity of musical roots from the colonial period to modern day rock and hip-hop.

The Way We Worked is Museum on Main Street's newest exhibition, curated by Bruce Bustard of the National Archives. This exhibition focuses on why we work and explores the needs that our jobs fulfill. American work takes place everywhere - on the land, on the streets of our communities, in offices and factories, in homes, in schools, in water, and in outer space. Through an exploration of the tools and technologies that enabled and assisted workers, from early American history through to the present day, this exhibit will explore how technology, society, and culture have shaped a more complex, and oftentimes more stressful, work environment. The exhibition will also explore the diversity of the American workforce - one of its greatest strengths and biggest challenges - and will showcase how people from different racial and cultural backgrounds both came to identify and segregate from one another.  Finally, the exhibit will explore how Americans identify with work, how they come to know work as meaningful, and how, whether one lives in SteelTown USA, dons a uniform every day, or never leaves their home, how work assigns cultural meanings and allows us to view our communities in a larger, social context. 

Applications for "The Way We Worked" are due August 31, 2010. Download an application. Communities will be announced in September.