One Exciting Partnership, Three New Exhibits

Spark! Places of Innovation, a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program, dives into innovation and invention happening in rural America. In small towns across America, people are creating new products, taking risks, meeting challenges together, and seizing upon exciting opportunities that change local life and sometimes reach far beyond. Spark! features stories from over 30 rural communities across the nation that reveal the dynamic relationship between place and creativity. Technical, social, cultural, artistic, or a combination of all of these—every innovation is as unique as each community. 

Spark! Places of Innovation is part of MoMS, a unique collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, state humanities councils across the nation, and local host organizations. To learn more, visit www.museumonmainstreet.org.

The Captain Avery Museum will present a companion exhibit titled “Buyboats to Beaches – 100 Years of Resiliency on the Chesapeake Bay” during the Spark Places of Innovation exhibition, showcasing the creativity and strength of marginalized communities. The exhibit focuses on the rise of summer colonies, beaches, and entertainment venues in Anne Arundel County created by Black and Jewish communities during segregation. As public spaces enforced exclusionary policies against both groups, they built their own havens—such as Columbia Beach, founded by Black Washingtonians in 1941, and the Avery home in Shady Side, which became “Our Place,” a cherished waterfront camp for a group of Jewish families starting in the 1930s.