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Museum on Main Street (MoMS)

"Journey Stories" in Monmouth. Photo by Jim De Young."Journey Stories" in Monmouth. Photo by Jim De Young.Museum 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 30,000 or less, or by invitation.

  • Journey Stories: Opening in Monmouth on January 30th and on display until March 14, 2010
  • New Harmonies: Opening in Danville on April 10, 2010
  • See photos of Museum on Main Street exhibitions

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.

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.

The IHC is now touring Journey Stories between May 2009 and March 2010, and New Harmonies, touring in 2010-2011. Please visit the "Events/Activities" section on page to see when and where you can view these exciting exhibitions.

Journey Stories Touring Schedule

  • Sycamore: May 31, 2009 - July 11, 2009
  • Mt. Carmel: July 19, 2009 - August 30, 2009
  • Lincoln: September 15, 2009 - October 18, 2009
  • Mascoutah: October 24, 2009 - December 6, 2009
  • Hampton: December 12, 2009 - January 24, 2010
  • Monmouth:  January 30, 2010 - March 14, 2010

Journey Stories tells how we and our ancestors came to America. From Native Americans to new American citizens and regardless of our ethnic or racial background, everyone has a story to tell. Our history is filled with stories of people leaving behind everything – families and possessions – to reach a new life in another state, across the continent, or even across an ocean. Many chose to move, searching for something better in a new land. Others had no choice, like enslaved Africans captured and relocated to a strange land and bravely asserting their own cultures, or like Native Americans already here, who were often violently removed by newcomers.

New Harmonies Touring Schedule

  • Vermilion County Museum (Danville): April 10, 2010 - May 23, 2010
  • White County Historical Society (Carmi): May 29, 2010 - July 11, 2010
  • Centralia Cultural Society (Centralia): July 17, 2010 - August 29, 2010
  • Lena Area Historical Museum (Lena): September 4, 2010 - October 17, 2010
  • Western Illinois Museum (Macomb): October 23, 2010 - December 5, 2010
  • Chillicothe Public Library (Chillicothe): Dec 11, 2010 - Jan 23, 2010

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.