Museum on Main Street (MoMS)
Apply to host Journey Stories in 2009-10
Museum on Main Street 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, fundraising, marketing, and interpretation of local history. Through these combined resources, Museum on Main Street and sparks lasting professional improvement for small town cultural organizations.
The IHC will begin the tour of Between Fences in October 2008 and Journey Stories in 2009. Please visit the "Events/Activities" link on this page to see when and where you can view these exciting exhibitions.
Between Fences
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, fences skirt our properties and are 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.
Journey Stories (touring May 2009 - March 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.
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