Picturing America Exhibit on display at the Bolduc House Museum

By Lesley Barker,  Museum Director

The Bolduc House Museum in downtown Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, interprets an eighteenth century French colonial site in the first town in our state. So, when the Humanities Council suggested that we host the traveling exhibit, Picturing America, we had to decide how it fits our mission. The exhibit is a series of 40 iconic American images arranged on large laminated posters. The images span our nation’s history from before colonial contact to the era of Civil Rights. Because the images do not specifically connect with our mission, except for John Audubon’s painting of a pink flamingo, we chose to use the exhibit to build our mailing list and as an outreach to local schools and homeschoolers. We decided to promote and install the exhibit in our two art galleries in time for the January 2011 Fourth Friday Ste. Genevieve Art Walk.

Usually we display original works by local artists at the Art Walk. So when this exhibit arrived and we discovered that it is a box full of simple posters, we realized that to meet the expectations I had set up for my board and community members would require us to add value to the exhibit so it could become specifically relevant to our Ste. Genevieve community. This realization was the grain of sand that grew into a pearl of great price for us.

 We decided to hold a “Word Picturing America Contest” in conjunction with the exhibit. We arranged for cash prizes for elementary, middle school, and high school winners to be funded by the Ste. Genevieve Downtown Renewal Project and for three history professors from South East Missouri University to judge the entries. To win, the students were asked select one of the images and write a creative piece that connected it to the place in Missouri where they live. Each entry had to fit on one side of a 3 x 5 index card.

 I wrote a caption that specifically connected each of the twenty selected images to Ste. Genevieve. We hung these and a metal ring filled with the index card entries sent in by the second through twelfth grade students.  The three winners read their winning entries for the gathered visitors at the Fourth Friday Art Walk. In attendance were Mary Peura of the Downtown Ste. Genevieve Renewal Project and Alisha Cole of the Missouri Humanities Council.

Would we host another traveling exhibit made available to us by the Humanities Council? Absolutely, and in fact, we have the Museum on Main Street The Way We Worked exhibit on display as I write this. The challenges posed to our museum by the opportunity to display these exhibits have made us rethink our goals. Not only were we able to connect our community with national conversations through both Picturing America and The Way We Worked, we have expanded our audience, increased our mailing list, and gained new business partners from our local community.   

The key to hosting a successful traveling exhibit, in our opinion, is to figure out how to fit it to the specific mission and goals of our own site. The benefits include new audiences, new donors, and new conversations with people and organizations from around the state and the nation. In fact, we would love to see the approach we took with Picturing America adopted by other Missouri museums and libraries with the results posted somewhere online. What a fabulous dialogue might ensue between students from across the state!

High School Winner: Kyle Phillips from Ste. Genevieve High School was inspired by “The Veteran in a New Field” by Winslow Homer

“Alone In My Field

The war is over but my work is not done

I’ve got hay to cut although we have won

Two sons I’ve lost in this miraculous battle

But I would trade it all back to see them with the cattle

Alone in my field no sons are found

Blood and Bones all over the ground

Back to my work cutting the hay

Because we fought the soldiers in gray”

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