HOUSTON, TX.- Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, today announced the appointment of Bradley C. Brooks as curator of the Bayou Bend Collection. Brooks comes to the Museum from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), where he most recently served as director of historic resources. He will begin his position in Houston in January 2015. Brooks succeeds longtime Bayou Bend curator Michael K. Brown, who passed away in September 2013.

“I am delighted that Bradley Brooks accepted the invitation to join our team,” said Tinterow. “After a year-long search, Mr. Brooks emerged as the ideal candidate—a seasoned professional with a passion for house museums and the community that sustains them. Bayou Bend director Bonnie Campbell and I look forward to working with him to interpret the extraordinary collection of Bayou Bend in exciting new ways.”

“I first learned of Bayou Bend and its wonderful collection when I was in graduate school—its reputation has always been of the very highest,” said Brooks. “While working in Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, I had the opportunity to visit and become better acquainted with Bayou Bend and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I am thrilled to now be able to join the staff, help build the collection, and present it to the Museum’s diverse audiences.”

In Houston, Brooks will be responsible for more than 5,000 works at Bayou Bend, collaborating with Museum staff on installing, conserving, and making acquisitions for one of the nation’s premier collections of early American paintings and decorative arts.

“Bradley Brooks has all of the qualities that we were seeking in a curator, including his background as an alumnus of the Winterthur Program and his extensive experience in historic house museums,” said Campbell. “Add to that his knowledge of 19th-century Texas material culture and his deep appreciation for that history, and you have a perfect match. I am very pleased to welcome Mr. Brooks to Bayou Bend.”

In 2000, Brooks joined the staff of the IMA as director of programs and operations at Oldfields– Lilly House and Gardens, where he planned and coordinated the refurnishing and reinterpretation of the historic 26-acre estate and house museum. He became director of historic resources at the IMA in November 2009. In that capacity, Brooks led the initiative for the transition of the Miller House and Garden—a Modernist residence declared a National Historic Landmark in 2000—from private ownership to IMA property. He has also served as assistant curator of American decorative arts at the IMA since November 2006. The Bayou Bend appointment marks a return to Texas for Brooks, who was director of the McFaddin-Ward House in Beaumont from 1995 to 2000 and curator, then director, of the Moody Mansion in Galveston from 1987 to 1995.

Brooks earned a bachelor of arts degree in communication arts from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and a master of arts in early American culture from the prestigious Winterthur Program of the University of Delaware. He attended the intensive Attingham Summer School program for English architecture and decorative arts in 1989. A scholar of American material culture, Brooks has lectured and published widely on the topic, including exhibition catalogues and regular contributions to the journal Winterthur Portfolio.