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Bradley Brooks, one of the employees at the Indianapolis Museum of Art is featured in this installment of the continuing series, Employee Profiles. Go behind the scenes at a major art museum to see what it takes to make it all work.
My name is Bradley Brooks. I'm Director of Programs and Operations for the Lilly House and Assistant Curator for American Decorative Arts.
Lilly House is part of a historic estate that is part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art campus, and it was home to the Hugh McKennan Landon family in the early 20th century
and later, beginning in the early 1930s, home to the J.K. Lilly Jr. family.
My job is an interesting mixture of a number of things. It's sort of part being an historian. I don't know how many other folks would have Emily Post on their reference shelf.
It's part being a curator and understanding the objects that were used in the house by the different families and how they were representative of their time.
We're fortunate to have a volunteer who's willing to work to make faux food, as they say, and we're particularly thrilled with the ham and the salmon that's in the butler's pantry.
The thing that I like best about the job is being able to share this house and its stories. We've got these wonderful orange trees in the loggia of the house, at Christmas time.
Plants like this could have been kept in the greenhouse when necessary, used outside when possible, brought inside for special times of the year such as for Christmas decoration.
I think, one of the things to remember is that Christmas at Lilly House goes on almost twelve months out of the year because the planning for Christmas begins in February or March.
During the time that the house is actually decorated, we have events here. It's a time that people tend to make repeat visits, and we've attempted to try to make the appearance
of Christmas at Lilly House as different as we can year to year. It's a rare thing for an art museum to have a property like this.
It's an even rarer thing for an art museum to present the property as we do looking at the entire property for its aesthetic elements whether they are in the interiors
or in the landscape, and I think that's the best part about working at the IMA for me.
What does "It's My Art" mean to me? To me, it means that we take the effort that we want to allow every visitor to claim his or her own art experience, whatever that is.
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