11/10/2023 | Angela Whitlock, CSRA

~*FEATURED VENDOR: Mark Hanson*~

During the month of November, the Museum Store wanted to acknowledge and give THANKS to the local artists and authors that allow us to support them.

For our second week of the month, we are featuring Mark Hanson. 

Mark Hanson has been a museum professionnal for over 25 years, specializing in collections management. 

Mark is the Curator of Collections and Exhibits at the Museum of the Grand Prairie, a position he has held for almost eight years. Under his direction, the museum has displayed such exhibits as 1968: A Time for Every Purpose, How Long Must Women Wait: Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights in Champaign County, and our latest exhibit, A History of Healing: Infectious Diseases and Community Responses to Defeat Them. 

Prior to this, he served as the Curator at Chanute Air Museum until it closed. There, he led and supervised an aircraft restoration and archive project, developed the museum's first collections policy and procedures for documentation, and, among other tasks, directed and managed the awared winning exhibit, "The 99th Pursuit Squadron from Rantoul to Ramitelli." 

Mark has a MA in Anthropology with an emphasis on archaeology from the University of Wyoming, where e was also an Assistant Curator. 

Mark's dedication to preserving and documenting local history, combined with being an aviation enthusiast, come together in his book, Images of America: Rantoul and Chanute Airforce Base, a project that began when the publisher reached out to him about finding an author for the subject matter. Published in 2011, the book "chronicles the long-standing and cohesive relationship between the farming town of Rantoul and the Chanute Air Force base." It details the ways in which Rantoul and the former Chanute Air Force Base are "inseparably intertwined as primary players in a single historical narrative that would become mutually beneficial and last for over 75 years." 

THANK YOU to Mark Hanson for allowing us to showcase your diligent work in creating this remarkable book, available at the Museum Store.