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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.

  • New Harmonies: Opening in Danville on April 10, 2010
  • The Way We Worked: Coming to Illinois in Fall 2011
  • 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.

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.