This exhibition, made possible through the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street (MOMS) program, has been developed especially for rural audiences and small museums with limited access to traveling exhibitions due to space and cost constraints.
The Way We Worked will tour six small Louisiana communities beginning in September 2013. Sites will be chosen based on geographic location, strength of proposed ideas for auxiliary events and physical display space.
In addition to covering six-week exhibition rental fees for each selected site, the LEH will make available grant funds (consult LEH staff regarding application procedure for these funds) to each host in support of ancillary local programs.
Eligibility Requirements:
Institution is a museum, public library or other cultural institution in a community of fewer than 12,000 residents
Institution has at least 750 square feet of exhibition floor space with at least 8-foot ceilings.
Institution is a non-profit organization.
Applications will be due Oct. 1, 2012. Interested organizations can contact LEH Grants Director Walker Lasiter for more information. He can be reached by e-mail at lasiter@leh.org.
About Museum on Main Street (MOMS):
In 2000, the LEH partnered with the Smithsonian Institution through its MOMS program to bring traveling exhibits to rural audiences and small museums that do not have access due to space and cost limitations.
MOMS brings rural Americans one-of-a-kind access to prestigious Smithsonian exhibitions and first-rate educational programs. Most importantly, MOMS gives rural museums a chance to demonstrate their enormous talents and their meaningful contributions to small town life.
So far, more than 100,000 rural Louisianians have attended MOMS programs and exhibitions. The Way We Worked marks the sixth MOMS project in Louisiana.
About the exhibition:
With their hands and minds hard at work and sweat on their brows, American workers perform a diverse array of jobs to power our society.
Whether we work for professional satisfaction and personal growth or to ensure the well-being of ourselves and our families, work is a part of nearly every American’s life. Office workers, factory workers, homemakers, truckers and the millions more who keep the nation going through their work make great contributions not only to industry, but also to American culture.
The diversity of the American workforce is one of its strengths, providing an opportunity to explore how people of all races and ethnicities identified commonalities and worked to knock down barriers in the professional world.
And, finally, the exhibition shows how we identify with work - as individuals and as communities. Whether you live in “Sugar Town, LA” or wear a uniform each day, work assigns cultural meanings and puts us and our communities in a larger context.
The Way We Worked, adapted from an original exhibition developed by the National Archives, explores how work became such a central element in American culture by tracing the many changes that affected the workforce and work environments over the past 150 years. The exhibition draws from the Archives’ rich collections to tell this compelling story.
The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities was established in 1972 to provide all Louisianans with access to and an appreciation of their own rich, shared and diverse historical, literary and cultural heritage through grant-supported outreach programs, family literacy and adult reading initiatives, teacher professional development institutes, publications, multi-media documentaries, museum exhibitions, public lectures, library projects and other public humanities programming.
The LEH is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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