David Blair, co-founder of Peterborough’s Mariposa Museum & World Culture Center, will share the story of how the museum came to be at Friday’s “Stories to Share” event at the Jaffrey Civic Center.

The event starts at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 4, and will be followed by a question-and-answer session. For information, go to jaffreyciviccenter.com/stories.

Blair’s talk will be interactive and will incorporate some of his favorite items from the Mariposa’s collection.

“I’m going to tell the story of the Mariposa Museum, but I’m also going to tell the story told by the museum. Every object has a story, and we have thousands of objects in our museums. Engaging people in these objects is the best way to tell our story,” Blair said.

Blair said the museum recently hosted an event for 120 students from Goffstown.

“We had 30 objects for them to examine, and we asked them to choose what interested them the most and then asked them to guess what the object was for. Everyone has their own set of knowledge; everyone knows different things,” Blair said.

Blair and his late wife, Linda Marsella, were public school educators for 34 years, and Blair taught for many years at Dublin Consolidated School.

“Linda and I noticed, while teaching, that a lot of children did not have the opportunity to travel. Some did, but not all, ” Blair said. “And while there can be quite a lot of diversity in a classroom of white students, because they can still be from very different backgrounds, there was very little racial diversity in this area at that time.”

From 1984 to 1993, Blair and Marsella lived overseas with their children, mostly in Southeast Asia, including in Vietnam and Cambodia. The thousands of pieces of art and artifacts at the Mariposa include items the family collected in their time spent living abroad and traveling.

“Much of what we have is folk art and it not signed by the artist. We often know where the item comes from, why someone made it and usually what it’s for, but not always,” Blair said.

When the family returned from living abroad, Blair became the Engish as a Second Language director at SAU 1.

“I got to meet all the immigrants in Peterborough. They were sort of an invisible population, but it was quite a large community, particularly of Cambodians,” Blair said.

In the fall of 2001, Blair and an investment group called the Downtown 2000 group purchased the building at 26 Main St. in Peterborough. His talk will include a short film about the history of 26 Main St., formerly the home of the Monadnock Ledger and the New England Marionette Opera, which was destroyed in a fire in 1999.

Marsella, who named the museum “Mariposa” after the Spanish word for “butterfly,” served as the first director of the museum until she died from cancer in 2007.

In creating the Mariposa Museum, Blair and Marsella wanted to share the art and culture of the wider world with the Monadnock region.

“What we try to illustrate here is how much we share as cultures as much as we are diverse from one another. We share as much as we are different; diversity is not something to be afraid of,” Blair said. “We want to encourage people’s imaginations.”

Currently, the museum is hosting “Textile Treasures of Guatemala.” For information about the Mariposa Museum, go to mariposamuseum.org.