Exhibits for Schools and Libraries

After 18 months of touring, the Sac and Fox Heritage Exhibit has been refurbished and readied for more touring to small venues. It is 10 feet wide and 8 feet tall, and it has its own built-in lighting. It is ideal for libraries or small museums. Contact me, Michael Bouman, about booking it at your museum, school, or public library in 2008.

A touring exhibit on Osage Heritage is also in production for the same venues.

High-Tech Benefits in "New Harmonies"

This is the last month we can accept community applications to host a touring Smithsonian exhibit on American "roots music" in 2009.

You can find a basic description of the exhibit on our web site. This article is all about why you should consider jumping in.


These exhibits are extremely popular in communities because they generate so much spirit and community involvement. The reason is, the exhibit is just the beginning! Host communities often create a local exhibit to go with the Smithsonian one. Where the subject is music, you can imagine the potential! Host communities also organize community activities. Again, just imagine the potential!

Do you have musical instrument makers in the vicinity? They could participate in fascinating ways? Do you have local people who compete in Bluegrass competitions or who represent other American musical traditions? How many people in your town do you imagine learned to play a musical instrument as some point in their lives?

Anything you can imagine about public activities or an exhibit can be enhanced, with our help, by setting a goal of creating some content for a web site. A library or museum might want to learn to create a downloadable audio recording of a local musician, or a podcast of an oral history interview with former students of a beloved band director. Or you might want to learn how to create an interactive feature where people in town can share pictures related to the theme of American music.

Involvement in the Smithson's exhibit program opens up all sorts of doors to involving the community and learning how to extend the life of your work on the internet. For any sponsor town that requests our help, we will organize training in techniques of gathering content so that it can be used in a variety of ways and of displaying content in a variety of formats.

We are very excited about helping people learn to function more comfortably in oral history, documenting, and disseminating. We'll help you set a goal and help you reach it.

The deadline for submitting an application is December 31, though. We want to give the six selected towns many months of lead time to create plans and work with us on ways and means of achieving them!

Contact my esteemed colleague, Patricia Zahn, if you need more information. -Michael Bouman

New Harmonies

We're still accepting applications through December to host the touring Smithsonian exhibit on American Roots Music in 2009. These exhibits are a perennial feature of MHC programming because they help local people generate a huge amount of interest in a historical theme. In fact, the attendance figure for these touring exhibits always exceeds the local population.

Sac and Fox Exhibit Goes to D.C.

The touring exhibit on Sac and Fox heritage is on display at Van Meter State Park through the end of November. Then it comes back for refurbishment and returns in January for more touring. It easily fits into small spaces in libraries or local museums, and it has its own lighting. Space required is ten linear feet. Set-up and take-down is a snap. Contact Michael Bouman for booking information in 2008. We have one new copy for touring in Missouri starting in January. We will have two copies available after March, when copy 2 returns from a three month engagement at the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. Congratulations to Sac and Fox Historic Preservation Officer, Sandra Massey, to Greg Olson (Missouri State Archives), who designed the exhibit, and to Dr. Fred Fausz at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who helped with the research.

Sac and Fox at the Sikeston Cowboy Festival

The portable exhibit on Sac and Fox heritage has been in continuous demand since it was unveiled in June of 2006. During the summer it resided in Sac and Fox communities in Kansas and Oklahoma, and then it moved to Sikeston. The Sikeston Depot Cultural Center is a lovely facility near a city park.

Beth Felice and I had a wonderful day there talking with Sac and Fox craftspeople who had travelled to give a two-day demonstration during the "Cowboy Up!" arts festival.

Read on: http://mohumanities.org/E-News/August07/sikeston.htm

Smithsonian "New Harmonies" Exhibit in 2009

Next month we're going to start accepting applications to host the touring Smithsonian exhibit on American Roots Music in 2009. These exhibits are a perennial feature of MHC programming because they help local people generate a huge amount of interest in a historical theme. It is always true that far more people visit the exhibit and its activities than actually live in the sponsoring town.



Check the details at http://mohumanities.org/E-News/August07/new_harmonies.htm