Mark Your Calendars... December 8, 2012 through January 19, 2013

Each of us has a powerful journey story deep in our personal heritage. It may be a story of a family uprooting itself in order to stay together, or of sons and daughters moving to another land, or of a distant ancestor. Americans have always been mobile.

Farmers, mechanics, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and slaves built American society over four centuries. Travel over trails, rails, rivers, roads, and in the sky shaped the American cultural and economic landscape.

Highlands Museum of the Arts(MOTA) has been selected as a Museum on Main Street site to host Journey Stories, a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution. The Florida Humanities Council has selected and funded six rural organizations throughout the state to host the exhibition for six weeks each, and to develop companion programming that connects their stories to the themes in the exhibition. MOTA will host Journey Stories from December 8, 2012, to January 19, 2013. The exhibit will examine the intersection between modes of travel and Americans’ desire to feel free to move. The story is diverse and focused on immigration, migration, innovation, and freedom. It is accounts of immigrants coming in search of promise in a new country; stories of individuals and families relocating in search of fortune, their own homestead, or employment; the harrowing journeys of Africans and Native Americans forced to move; and, of course, fun and frolic on the open road.

With 2012 marking the centennial of Sebring, it is particularly fitting that the local histories and the effects that different groups of settlers have had on our our culture will be highlighted in special exhibits and companion events throughout 2012 and 2013. With Highlands County’s traditions rooted in agriculture, in the military, in tourism, and special influences such motor sports, there is a rich diversity to draw from in developing local interest programs to inform, to educate, and to just delight the community.