For many people living in rural communities across the U.S., visiting the Smithsonian Museums in Washington can seem out of reach. To bridge that gap, the Smithsonian Institute launched an outreach program called Museum on Main Street, or MOMS. The initiative brings traveling exhibitions, educational resources, and cultural programming to small towns across the country. Earlier this summer, the exhibition, “Voices and Votes: Democracy in America”, made its way to Massachusetts at the Ashby Free Public Library.
For this week’s Joy Beat honoree, we are spotlighting Heather Brody Perry, Library Director at the Ashby Free Public Library and Project Manager for “Voices and Votes”.
Heather joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about bringing this exhibit to her community. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: Before we discuss the exhibit in detail, could you tell us a bit more about this Museum On Main Street program?
Heather Brodie Perry: So, Museums on Main Street brings a visiting exhibit to six small libraries in a state. And along with it, it brings an amount of money to hold a minimum of six programs during the six weeks that it is in each community. And it comes with approximately a one‑year training program to develop and hold those programs. So over that period, we worked with our cohort —individuals at Mass Humanities and the other program directors at the other five institutions where the exhibit was being held — to design the programs and to design a community conversation around holding the exhibition and advertising, marketing, and all of the things that we would need to do to bring the exhibit to our community.
Rath: Oh, so it sounds very collaborative.
Perry: It is. I worked with several interns from area colleges, as well as with individuals in our community. Especially our Historical Society — Alan Pease and the individuals at our Ashby Historical Society — came up with a fantastic micro‑exhibit about the history of Ashby, including the contributions of women in Ashby over the last two centuries, and the role of the Ashby Grange, as well as political events in Ashby over the last two centuries. So all sorts of exciting things have happened in Ashby throughout its history.
Rath: That’s awesome. Tell us some more about how it came together and what “Voices in Votes” is meant to be about.
Perry: So it’s a non‑partisan examination of democracy throughout the whole history of our country, from basically the very beginning until roughly about now. And it’s an interactive exhibit, so it has several games that people can play: from deciding what the most American food is or deciding who influenced the country the most; what images and words most represent our ideas of democracy; what does it mean to be a citizen; what kinds of ideas and words and values come to mind when you think about what it means to be a citizen? And the way they have designed the exhibit is to get people engaged. So, they have a bunch of parts of the exhibition for people to take photos of themselves, to record themselves. They have hashtags. All sorts of different things. And the first community in Massachusetts it was at was the Mohawk Valley Regional School District. And the folks at Mohawk Valley came up with a bunch of activities for kids to do. And they have shared those activities with all of the different libraries, so we can get our kids involved in a greater way than even the Smithsonian had thought about. So, we have kids involved in ranked‑voting activities and scavenger hunts. All sorts of different things. It’s really an activity for everyone in the family, not just typical museum‑goers, maybe. So from just a little tiny tots up to adults. And it’s an interactive exhibit.
Rath: That’s brilliant, and I guess an exhibit about democracy should be interactive in that way.
Perry: Yeah, it’s fantastic and it’s wonderful that it’s come to Ashby, which is a great place for something that is so multifaceted because Ashby is a really purple town in Massachusetts and it’s a town that’s right on the border of New Hampshire where people in Ashby have always had the opportunity to sort of get a little bit of a bird’s‑eye view on the first‑in‑the‑nation primaries because we’re right on the border. So, it’s a great place to have such an exhibit because we get lots of visitors from New Hampshire who can come and see the exhibit as well.
Rath: Tell us about the public response so far.
Perry: It’s been pretty good so far. I mean, the summer is tough because lots of people are on vacation, but we’ve had some wonderful visitors who have had just a fantastic response to the exhibit. They’ve enjoyed coming to the exhibit. And so far we’ve had a few programs and we have a lot more programs coming up that people will be able to get involved in. And the attendance at those programs has been good so far, and we’re hoping that it will continue to be good.
Rath: You have some strong Ashby angles to the history here, including how important Ashby was in the women’s suffrage movement.
Perry: Yeah, so we have a lot of really strong personalities in Ashby, and we’ve had a lot of strong women over time. Even before women had the ability to vote, women had a really strong role in Ashbey. Women could vote in the Ashby Grange, which was very powerful in Ashby. At one point in history, it was the largest Grange in the state, and considering that women were very good at sort of running the economy even when times were really bad. So women have been a really pivotal part of the town throughout the town’s entire history. So the micro‑exhibit focuses on a lot of those strong women and the contributions that women have made over time in Ashby.
Rath: How long is this exhibit going to run? I think a lot of people might like to make the trip out there to see it.
Perry: Our part of the exhibit is available until September 6th, and the Ashby portion — our Ashby micro‑exhibit — will be up for longer than that. But the Smithsonian portion of the exhibit will be in Ashby until September 6th. And then it will be moving on to Douglas, Holbrook, and then East Sandwich after us.
If you’d like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at 617-300-BEAT [2328].
