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.

This exhibition runs from May 30, 2009 - July 11, 2009, at the Engh Farm at 1730 North Main Street in Sycamore.

We live between fences. We may hardly notice them, but they are dominant features in our lives and in our history. Built of hedge, concrete, wood and metal, the fence skirts our properties and is central to the American landscape. We use them to enclose our houses and neighborhoods. They are decorative structures that are as much part of the landscape as trees and flowers. Industry and agriculture without fences would be difficult to imagine. Private ownership of land would be an abstract concept.

But fences are more than functional objects. They are powerful symbols. The way we define ourselves as individuals and as a nation becomes concrete in how we build fences.

Through an examination of boundaries, place, and space, Between Fences will explore how neighbors and nations divide, protect, offend, and defend through the boundaries they build.

 

This exhibit runs from June 13, 2009 - July 26, 2009