♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] In the center of Cedar Rapids, three institutions keep Iowa's history alive.

Their exhibits dive deep into our diverse heritage through art, culture and tales of resilience.

We begin at the African American Museum of Iowa.

Exploring the stories of community and strength that have shaped the state's black history.

♪♪ [Jacqueline Hunter] When you come to visit you will see our permanent exhibit, which is here throughout the year, and then we have a rotating exhibit that is usually here for about 11 months.

The permanent exhibit is going to take you from our very beginnings, the African American experience and our origins in Africa through the middle passage it will bring you up through reconstruction, the Civil War, civil rights into more modern times with ending basically of the election of President Barack Obama.

We are definitely a museum that wants to encourage conversation.

We want to encourage change.

We want to encourage different perspectives.

What we do here is important for two reasons.

One, because we are telling the story and we're telling the story that may not be told anywhere else.

Two, because it allows us to hopefully prepare a new generation not only from the perspective of coming into the museum and being guests, but one day someone has to take over, they have to be willing to continue to tell the story.

[Kohlsdorf] Inside the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, guests will discover a uniquely Midwestern collection of paintings and sculpture.

[Sean Ulmer] There is a group of Cedar Rapidians who had gone to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and had gone to the fine arts pavilion there and decided that Cedar Rapids needed an arts organization.

So, they founded an art club and met in each other's living rooms and talked about the artists and architects of the day and prior.

And that grew eventually to the Cedar Rapids Art Association and they began to collect works of art in 1906.

From those modest beginnings, we have grown to be a premier smaller art museum that is well known in the United States not just for its collection of work by Grant Wood, but other works in the collection.

We have a collection of about 8,000 pieces.

It is primarily American art in focus.

Our collection is primarily 20th and 21st century.

And we have a specialization in Iowa and Midwestern art.

We like having that kind of a collection here because it allows us to tell a very different story than other museums.

We can really focus on Iowa's contribution to the history of art and it's not something that many other museums focus on.

♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Across the Cedar River, the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library celebrates a cultural heritage and immigrant spirit that became an integral part of Cedar Rapids history.

[Cecilia Rokusek] At one point early on in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Cedar Rapids boasted of a population of Czechs of over 40%.

So, in 1974, this group of visionaries had this idea to start a museum so we never lose our culture.

In 1992, by an act of Congress, we were established as the national.

We are the only national Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in the United States.

We have five galleries, one permanent and four temporary that change throughout the year.

We tell the Czech story, the Slovak story and the American story and the story of immigration.

We hope that everyone who comes through the doors of this museum will learn about their own culture and say, you know, I may be German, I may be Norwegian, but I remember how my grandparents came over and that they tell their children and their children's children because I think one of the major things in our country today is that we forget what our cultural heritage is.

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