Browse Exhibits (18 total)

This exhibit highlights the leadership of Andrew Wylie, Theophilus A. Wylie, and, by extension, Indiana University Bloomington between 1829 (Andrew Wylie’s first year as president of Indiana University) and 1895 (Theophilus Wylie’s death). It explores primary materials related to nineteenth-century publication, education, presidential addresses, public science, scholarly libraries, science and religion, student experiences, and the Civil War.

Capturing the likeness of yourself or your loved one was not always as simple as pressing a button. The Indiana frontier had few professional artists, and faithful oil portraits were expensive and hard to come by. Itinerant silhouette cutters filled the gap, and later, daguerreotypes and other forms of early photography brought lifelike portraiture to Indiana. Theophilus Wylie was a pioneer of photography in the state, and soon other photographers followed in his footsteps.

What was life like for Elizabeth “Lizzie” Breckenridge (1843-1910), an African-American woman who spent most of her life living with and working as a domestic servant for the Theophilus Wylie family? Pulling from a variety of primary sources, this exhibit pieces together her life experience in the second half of the 19th century in Bloomington, Indiana.

Theophilus and Rebecca Wylie moved into the Wylie House in the mid-nineteenth century, when households were transitioning from large-scale agriculture to small-scale leisure gardening, or floriculture. This exhibit showcases the June 2018 field school run by a team of Indiana University students and Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology staff to learn more about the Wylies’ garden “pits,” subterranean cold-frame greenhouses that insulated their flowers from harsh weather.

If anyone recognizes Louise Bradley’s name today, it is probably due not to her own talent as a writer, but to her connection with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop. This great-granddaughter of Theophilus and Rebecca Wylie had a creative life of her own, however, and the diary she kept in the early 1930s sheds light on her writing, her time in college and after graduation, and her career as a research worker during the Great Depression and World War II.

The Morton C. Bradley, Jr. Education Center provides meeting, exhibit, and research space for Indiana University’s historic Wylie House Museum, which was home to four generations of Wylie family members after it was built by IU’s first president, Andrew Wylie, in 1835. The Education Center bears the name of Wylie descendent Morton C. Bradley, Jr., who bequeathed several original sculptures, a museum support fund, and a trove of family documents and heirlooms to the museum in 2004.

Stargazing is a multidisciplinary arts and humanities project that brought together Indiana University faculty - a poet, a choral director, and a museum archivist - to create new ways to make visible the life of Elizabeth "Lizzie" Breckenridge (1843-1910), a free woman and the domestic employee of Professor Theophilus WYlie, cousin of Andrew Wylie, the first president of IU.  

In the spring of 2020, Indiana University MFA student Christine Wang recieved an IU-Bloomington Public Arts Grant funded by the office of the Vice Provost of Research and the Arts and Humanities Council and planned to conduct several paper-making workshops and install artwork at the Wylie House Museum. Unfortunately, her work was cut short due to COVID-19. This exhibit displays the artwork she installed in the Wylie gardens and explains her message of environmental consiousness and the connection between art and the earth.

Quilts are valuable examples of practical folk art. The Wylie House quilt collection contains examples of 19th and 20th century quilts, as well as a robust collection of modern reproductions of period quilts by a volunteer group of quilters. Explore our collection and learn more about the role that they played in the lives of the Wylie family and others throughout history.