Art and educational exhibitions illustrate transformative moments in Missouri and U.S. history. The State Historical Society of Missouri houses exhibition galleries at the Center for Missouri Studies in Columbia. SHSMO also provides materials for display in galleries and exhibition spaces across the state.
Artist David Plank has devoted his life to the artistic study of Missouri’s birds. Unlike some wildlife artists, Plank never bases his images on photographs. Instead, he creates field studies and bases his finished paintings on these sketches. Plank’s images are thus a direct record of his intimate observations of the birds of Missouri.
Music in Missouri explores Missouri’s contribution to American music. The state’s early folk musicians, marching bands, and choral societies inspired the birth of ragtime and then overlapped with the evolution of a new brand of blues in St. Louis. Those emerging styles then intersected with an explosion of new jazz in Kansas City, at the same time that Ozark bluegrass migrated northwards and entered this melting pot of rhythm to help create rock n’ roll, rhythm and blues, modern country, and gospel.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Daniel Fitzpatrick, chronicled the progression of World War II as it happened with powerful and poignant editorial cartoons. The final installment of this eighteen-month exhibition focuses on the ending years of the war, including the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced Japan’s surrender on V-J Day, August 15, 1945.
This yearlong exhibition in three installments showcases examples of Thomas Hart Benton’s original watercolors and drawings for the Limited Editions Club publications of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi. As a Missourian, Benton brought his own understanding of the landscape and people of the state to his illustrations, creating perceptive images that complement Twain’s prose.
