Calendar of Events for 2025-2026
BRADLEY BROOKS
“Americana in a Far Country: Ima Hogg and the Bayou Bend Collection”
MONDAY, May 18, 2026
The Lyceum, 201 South Washington Street, 7 P.M. light refreshments, 7:30 lecture
Ima Hogg (1882-1975), daughter of James Stephen Hogg, the first native-born governor of Texas, lived for a time in the Texas governor’s mansion in Austin. The experience helped shape her appreciation for both antique furniture and history. In the early 1920s, she began to collect American antiques, including glass, ceramics, and furniture. Later in the decade, she embarked on the construction of Bayou Bend in Houston, which would be her home until the 1960s. As her collection grew, Miss Hogg resolved that she would establish a museum, seeking to bring early American art and history to Texas. She made gifts of her home and collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Bayou Bend opened to the public in 1966. Miss Hogg’s remarkable foresight, determination, and humility created an institution that has grown and flourished, and that continues to interpret an expanding narrative of American art and history via its collections and programs. This presentation will explore the development of the Bayou Bend Collection under Miss Hogg’s guidance and will also discuss more recent additions.
Bradley Brooks is a specialist in historic house museums with a background in American decorative arts. He came to Bayou Bend in 2015 from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where he served as founding curator for two historic house museums, Oldfields, the J. K. Lilly, Jr. residence, and Eero Saarinen’s Miller House. He also served as assistant curator of American decorative arts. Previously, he was director of the McFaddin-Ward House in Beaumont, Texas; and founding curator, then director, of the Moody Mansion in Galveston. He earned a B.A. in communication arts from Elizabethtown College, and an M.A. in early American culture from the Winterthur Program of the University of Delaware. Please join us in welcoming Bradley to Alexandria.
2025-6 Dates
SUN, Sept 28: Patty Sheetz, Architectural Walking Tour, How to Read a Church
MON, Oct 20: Catesby Leigh, The Federal Architecture Wars
MON, Nov 17: Patrick Mullins, Riotous Prints and Seditious Pots: Political Radicalism in the Fine and Decorative Arts on the Eve of the American Revolution
MON, Jan 19: Andrea Tracey, America’s Diplomatic Treasures Abroad
MON, Feb 16: Carol Cadou, Celebrating America250: Preserving a Future for our Nation's Past
MON, Mar 16: Jeffrey Ricketts, The Antiques and Architecture of Brick Meeting House, Maryland, 1700-1870
MON, Apr 20: Emilie Johnson, The Experience of Boarding in Late Eighteenth America
MON, May 18: Bradley Brooks, Americana in a Far Country: Ima Hogg and the Bayou Bend Collection