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August Issue 2004

Pickens County Museum in Pickens, SC, Offers Smithsonian Exhibition About Barns

The Pickens County Museum in Pickens, SC, is offering the exhibitions, Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon, and Barnstormin' the Carolina Upcountry, on view from Aug. 7 through Sept. 17, 2004.

The Pickens County Museum is honored to have been selected as the only Upcountry venue to host the Smithsonian Institute's traveling exhibition, Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon.

Barns - proud skyscrapers of rural America. Simple yet majestic structures that lined highways and back roads. Strong warehouses of varying shapes built by those who worked the land and used them to store farming equipment, feed, seed and later, the season's harvest. They were the heart and soul of the farm. As times changed and the state moved from an agrarian society to a mechanized one, many of these symbols of a simpler time were abandoned, fell into ruin and nearly disappeared from the landscape.

Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon is changing this. Developed by the Smithsonian Institute's Traveling Exhibition Service, this touring exhibit explores the barn as both a cultural and agricultural icon. It examines the building as an architectural structure and as a means of expressing beliefs about what our country was and could be. It also explores the origin and fate of the barn in its roles as warehouse, factory and legend.

In addition to the main traveling exhibit, the Pickens County Museum is mounting the "sister" exhibition, Barnstormin' the Carolina Upcountry as a multidisciplinary presentation of photography and visual arts from Dale Cochran, Lynn Greer, Marshall McCall, Olivia McGee, Gale McKinley, Beth Bullman Regula, and others, along with historic accounts, folklore and "good ol' stories" about the barns of the South Carolina Upcountry and how they were, are and will be used.

Program highlights, in addition the ongoing exhibitions, includes:

On Aug. 14, 2004, at 1pm, Dr. Melissa Walker from Converse College will conduct a free Oral History Workshop. This seminar will deal exclusively with the recording of oral histories so to archive community histories & resources.

Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon and all related programs are free to the public and funded in part by The Humanities Council of SC, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; by the Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative; and by an Anonymous Sponsor In Honor of Our Local Farming Community. Media Sponsorship provided by WESC Radio 92.5.

For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the Museum at 864/898-5963.


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