A new exhibit at the Spencerville Mill and Museum is looking to share stories from residents on how they’ve coped through the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Spencerville Mill Foundation is looking to honour residents who found creative ways to get through these difficult times through its COVID-19: History in the Making Exhibit.
Volunteer Marketing Director for the Foundation Sandra Ketchum says the exhibit is looking to answer the question of how we will be viewed a generation from now.
“How did we cope,” Ketchum said. “We wanted to share and capture that information so that another generation will look back on this incredible, global pandemic and know what happened from a very personal point of view.”
The Foundation is asking residents to contribute stories, testimonials, photos, videos, children’s artwork, artifacts, and other items to be included in a time capsule which will be featured in the exhibit.
Ketchum says the exhibit will also look to honour innovations and adaptations made by businesses and organizations, including churches.
“We think it will be a great exhibit but we need people in Spencerville and in a 35-mile radius around Spencerville to send us in what they did,” Ketchum said. “And we’ll put it all together in what we think will be a really wonderful exhibit about living history.”
In addition, a special juried art show Creativity Through Crisis: Works from a Global Pandemic will showcase talented visual artists and wordsmiths.
Whether comical, sad, or crazy, Ketchum says they want to capture different viewpoints of how residents made use of their time.
“It was so awful sometimes, but I think we’ve all heard the words ‘we’re all in this together,’ expressed so many times,” Ketchum said. “I think we really lived that and believed it. We had to look after each other and we had to find ways to cope.”
The deadline for submissions is June 5th, and the exhibit runs from July 2 to August 25.
You can contact the Spencerville Mill Foundation for more information.