Alpine
Spark! Places of Innovation, a traveling exhibit created by the Smithsonian Institute, is coming to the Museum of the Big Bend, while events designed to connect with the display begin across the region.
Spark! Places of Innovation will be at the Museum of the Big Bend from July 3 to August 8, 2026, as part of its tour of small towns across the country. Admission to the museum is free for the exhibit’s six-week run, thanks to sponsorships from the Flying W Ranch and West Texas National Bank.
The exhibit, including multiple interactive displays, looks at how small towns across the country have used art, technology, social connection, and cultural heritage as sparks for innovation and to reenergize their communities.
“Spark! asks a deceptively simple question: How do small, isolated communities find ways to invent, adapt, survive and thrive?” said museum officials.
“It’s put together by the Smithsonian to reflect innovation in different rural communities throughout the U.S.,” said Emily Wilkinson, director of the Museum of the Big Bend. “It goes into different rural communities and shows different ways that they’ve displayed innovation and different interactive components, videos, and things that give people a chance to respond, either with surveys or response cards.”
Visitors to the exhibit will learn about towns, including Helper City, Utah, population 2,105, that was left with a threatened economy and environment when mines and railroads closed, and Reedsburg, Wisconsin, that had a dwindling population and a vacant downtown.
According to the exhibit, by reaching out for help from the American Institute of Architects in Utah and to Utah State University, Helper City now has an award-winning master plan design to turn its “historic Main Street into a heritage-honoring, but forward-looking, business and entertainment district,” while Reedsburg was reenergized by artists who created a retreat, an artist-in-residency program and annual festival around a working farm.
The staff at the Museum of the Big Bend has also been working for about 18 months to extend the exhibit to their current displays and to special events outside the building throughout the Big Bend region.
“In addition to the Smithsonian exhibit, we’re going to reinterpret our permanent exhibit on the Big Bend legacy and point to how that exhibit showcases … the different methods of innovation that they point to in Spark!,” said Wilkinson. “They kind of highlight the four different areas: art, technology, heritage and social innovation.”
Some of the events connected to the exhibit include the creation of a new mural by Sul Ross Professor Ramon Deanda across from Alpine Elementary School, an event focused on guitars in conjunction with Viva Big Bend, hat-making demonstrations by Olympia Hats, and dinosaur presentations with Big Bend National Park.
“We have a pretty robust programming schedule happening throughout the region,” Wilkinson said. “One of the things that makes us unique is that this Big Bend region is so large and spread out that we wanted to include as many people as possible. So, we have a lot of different activities going on in Alpine, but also Fort Davis has a whole host of activities.”
Marfa, Presidio, and Van Horn will also offer special events in conjunction with the exhibit, she said.
“We’ve told them to think about, ‘How does this tie into innovation?’ which is a pretty broad topic but a good way to think about, you know, life,” Wilkinson said. “Life could be very hard out here if we didn’t have innovative people that made it a place that would be inhabitable for us.”
Area residents will be able to find a calendar of Spark! related events on the Museum of the Big Bend website.
