2022-2023 Exhibition Tour

Museum on Main Street brings high-quality Smithsonian traveling exhibitions to Main Street museums, historical societies, and other small-town cultural venues across the country. These exhibits boost civic pride, as residents young and old, from diverse backgrounds come together to share and celebrate their heritage. Host venues are selected through a competitive application and awarded to communities as a cohort that will work and train together over the next year, leading up to opening day at the first venue.

Hopeful. Participatory. Community-building.

Through a year-long engagement before the Smithsonian exhibition arrives, five Maryland communities will explore their story of rural change in  through the lens of the five organizing themes of Crossroads: identity, land, community, persistence and managing change. Host venues will collaborate across sectors, and create companion exhibits, develop programs, events, or storytelling projects, alongside a team of museum consultants, partners, and local scholars.

Sites selected to host the Crossroads exhibition will:

• Assign two project coordinators for the exhibition who will attend planning meetings and work together coordinate the project from beginning to end
• Implement publicity in your local community and region in cooperation with Maryland Humanities
• Produce a local companion exhibition and host public humanities programs
• Host a grand opening/ribbon cutting and invite public officials, media, legislators, congressional representatives, and others
• Provide a cost share report at the project’s conclusion tracking all staff and volunteer time, facility expenses, and other donated resources
• Provide a secure, dry space to store empty exhibition crates for the duration of the exhibition.
• Engage in cooperative publicity
• Contribute hard work and some out-of-pocket expenses

The exhibition will explore historic events and pose questions for today in the following content areas:

Identity: Rural America is at the heart of our national identity. Those who came to America saw boundless plains ready for cultivation. Indigenous people saw their landscapes differently.

Land: Rural Americans build their homes, farms, businesses, communities, and sense of worth on land. Land is a finite resource and requires significant investment. Americans link the reality of ownership with the ideal of independence. They yearn for their own piece of land, which confirms their personal autonomy and symbolizes their political influence and contribution to the local economy. Many develop a strong sense of place, an emotional, almost spiritual, connection between physical locations and their personal identity.

Community: Rural life revolves around crossroads communities–towns, villages, and rural hamlets. These communities are powerful, dynamic places where people connect–exchange ideas, work towards common goals, rely on neighbors, and build a future.

Persistence: Rural Americans believe in their communities. They struggle to resolve issues rather than abandoning the places where they live. Change affects farm-dependent and open-country places differently than hardscrabble mountain tops or suburban and exurban counties at the edge of metropolitan areas. No solution works everywhere. People at the crossroads develop strategies that work for them. Rural people understand the unique challenges they face, and the importance of trying to solve them.

Managing Change: People have strong but often differing opinions about important issues relating to rural America and its small-towns. In the twenty-first century, all Americans, including those in suburban and urban areas, will play an important role in shaping the future of rural America.