The Main Street Museum ...

From the Museum website located in White River Junction, VT http://www.mainstreetmuseum.org/

The Museum forges links and reflects meanings from object to object, from object to viewer, and from the viewer back to the object again.

Assigning values to artifacts is increasingly difficult in the environment of most major collecting institutions. The neutrality of theoretical systems utilized by any museum is currently being called into question. As a small independent repository the Main Street Museum has the flexibility—indeed the mandate—to examine the layered and ever changing meanings of objects and their relationships to their surroundings. As the uses for objects are more or less continuously in flux, we analyze these uses through traditional disciplines (art historical, scientific and qualitative methods), but also through psychological analysis as well. Our emotional relationship with objects is formed abstrusely. Therefore the meaning of objects is unlocked only through similar cryptic means.

We accession items based on the sustained interest that has been shown them and the attentiveness they demonstrate towards us. Perhaps the only true meaning in objects lies in the questions we ask them and in the questions each one of them asks of us.