In 2025-2026, Mass Humanities partnered with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and six communities across the state to bring the Museum on Main Street exhibit “Voices and Votes: Democracy in America” to Massachusetts. The exhibit opened on April 17, 2025, with speeches and songs, as the Mohawk Trail Regional School prepared to open the exhibit to their community.
As I watched Tinky Weisblat, one of the project directors, lift a microphone and belt out “We Shall Overcome,” I felt an upswell of pride. I’m a Program Officer here at Mass Humanities, and my main job is coordinating the Museum on Main Street program. I began working with “Voices and Votes” as soon as I started at Mass Humanities and have spent the better part of two and a half years immersed in the themes of the exhibition. The history of American democracy, this exhibition shows us, isn’t just about casting votes at the ballot box; it’s about raising your voice to make a difference in your community.
I thought a lot about what it means to raise one’s voice as I helped move the exhibit from the earliest workshops through to its closing day. Museum on Main Street is designed to bring Smithsonian exhibits to rural communities across the country, making world-class exhibits available to as many people as possible. Ask someone to describe Massachusetts, and they probably won’t use the word “rural”. From the Berkshires to the Cape, however, there are towns that are small, isolated, and struggle with the same issues as other rural communities across the country. The loss of agricultural and manufacturing jobs, unreliable Internet infrastructure, difficulty accessing healthcare facilities—these are realities in Massachusetts as much as in any other state. Bringing the Smithsonian to towns like Ashby or Buckland is one way to recognize those stories and struggles. Mass Humanities brings resources and the Smithsonian brings name recognition, but it’s the local communities who bring the most important part: the people.
The local project directors—Tinky Weisblat and the social studies teachers at Mohawk Trail Regional School; Sabrina Touhey in Lee; Heather Perry in Ashby; Lisa Mosczynski in Douglas; Patty Conway in Holbrook; and Amy Johnson in East Sandwich—are the people who make MoMS work. They are all go-getters, the kind of people who are known in their communities. To host Museum on Main Street, these teachers, librarians, humanists, historians and museum directors wore many hats, keeping so many balls in the air with such grace that I could only be in awe. They knew their community’s stories and knew what their community needed space to talk about. They designed programming, built partnerships, and conducted outreach to get their communities through the door.
All of this work was directed at one goal, which each of the project directors had articulated during the planning process: engaging a multitude of community voices. This meant more to them than attracting people to their organization’s programs. They all wanted to increase the feeling of community in their towns. The pandemic, they observed, had isolated people from one another. Political division had made it harder and harder to have conversations, as national politics crept into even the most local issues. Participation in local civic life, from town elections to town meeting, was plummeting. In Holbrook, it was increasingly challenging to get a quorum to run town meeting, while at the Mohawk Trail Regional School, there was an widening gulf between the school community and the townspeople who pay school taxes, but didn’t have children in the school system and didn’t see the impact of the funds.
Museum on Main Street was an invitation to participate in community life. “Voices and Votes” reminded people that voting is not the only way we participate in our democracy. Petitions, protests, letters to the editor, music, art, calls to legislators: all of these are ways to engage in the public conversation about how we want our communities to be. The exhibit and the programming that the project directors ran invited people to engage with their neighbors at trivia nights, documentary screenings, book clubs, and children’s programs. Each project director designed and hosted a community conversation about a locally important issue, from school closures to river cleanups, the importance of town elections to immigration.
People showed up, and they stayed. In Ashby, the town used the community conversation program from “Voices and Votes” as the basis for community discussions around starting a charter school, and another conversation program about democracy gave rise to the monthly Democracy Book Club at the Ashby Public Library. In Holbrook, attendance at town meeting increased. Across the state, visitors reported on surveys that the exhibit had empowered them to participate in democracy by voting in national and local elections—and by talking to their neighbors about issues in their community.
When Museum on Main Street opened in Lee in June 2025, I stood to the side and watched as project director Sabrina Touhey lifted a microphone and performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sabrina’s voice, clear and resonant, echoed across the street, the doors opened, and community poured in.
