Permanent Collection
The Neill-Cochran House Museum
Our guided and self-guided tours both include walk-throughs of the two original structures on the property, the main house and the slave quarters. Our spaces are installed with furnishings that tell our site's history from its beginning in 1856 up to 1930, including through objects that were in the home during the Cochrans' 60-year residency. For more information on the museum’s collections, please visit our Collections Page.
All admission to the site also includes access to our temporary exhibitions.
Historic Teaching Garden
The newest part of the NCHM self-guided tour leads guests behind the Museum where herbs, vegetables, and ornamental plants historically associated with the property are growing in the beds surrounding the back of the house.
Temporary Exhibits
Aftermath I, oil on canvas, 30x30in. (2003)
On Display September 11, 2024 - January 12, 2025
Cassandra James Retrospective
The Neill-Cochran House Museum is honored to present a retrospective exhibition of the work of the Austin-based and nationally acclaimed landscape painter Cassandra James. Over five decades, James developed a unique painterly style embedded in the principles of European Renaissance paint layering. This exhibition will for the first time in over a decade bring together work that remains in the collection of the artist’s family and friends, including sketchbooks that illuminate her practice.
Upcoming Exhibits
On Display january 22, 2025 - May 25, 2025
Threads of Her Story
This exhibition honors the often overlooked artistry and labor of the women who crafted not only quilts but also the garments of their time. These items reflect the rich cultural fabric of Austin from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. We invite you to explore the connection between fashion and function, art and utility, as seen through the textiles of the time.
Past Exhibits
A juneteenth rodeo
Displayed June 5, 2024 - September 8, 2024
A Juneteenth Rodeo is a collection of the photos by bestselling author Sarah Bird taken in the late 1970s in the jubilant, vibrant, vital, and now all-but vanished world of small-town Black rodeos.
Lawrence Jolly, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
Texas Lost and Found
DISPLAYED January 24, 2024 - May 26, 2024
With Texas: Lost and Found, the treasures I discovered are speaking not only to the lives and living they once supported, but also of my own personal reactions to the world around us, both then and now.
The fountain in the NCHM Centennial Garden
Hope for Spring: Texas Water
DISPLAYED MARCH 20, 2024 - APRIL 28, 2024
Spring has returned to the Neill-Cochran House Museum, and with it the fourth annual Hope for Spring juried art exhibition. Hope for Spring: Texas Water is our celebration of Texas water, and how it revitalizes not only us, but the land around us.
Jacob Guzman, Weight Bearing, 2023. Mixed media, 24 x18 in.
Liberating Black Art
DisPlayed August 30, 2023 - January 14, 2024
Liberating Black Art presents artworks from the permanent collection of the Black Diaspora Archive at The University of Texas at Austin in conversation with two local, private collections. Collectively, these works highlight the distinct yet cohesive, approach of artists in using creativity as an antidote to systemic erasure and misrepresentation and as a means of celebrating the cultural legacy of people of African descent.
Reji Thomas, Irish Hill Rising, 2020. Oil on canvas, 25 x 18. Collection of the artist.
Signs and Symbols: The Trees Are Talking
DISPLAYED January 11, 2023 - August 13, 2023
This spring, the Neill-Cochran House Museum is honored to present Signs and Symbols: The Trees are Talking. This one-woman show features original glass art and works on canvas by longtime Austin artist Rejina Thomas. The works explore Reji’s understanding of the way signs and symbols constantly surround us in both the natural and built environments. Navigating America, and, for many decades Austin, as a Black woman has given Reji perspective on her own heritage as well as the cultural ties that bind us across races and ethnicities.
Hope for Spring: Texas Trees
Displayed March 22, 2023 - May 7, 2023
Celebrate Spring among the beautiful Texas Trees.
Cornerstone: Freemasonry, Texas and the Neill-Cochran House Museum
Displayed June 2, 2022 - January 11, 2023
Learn about the impact Freemasonry has had on our city, our state, and our nation from the 13 colonies, to the settlement of Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, to the Civil War, and even our relationship with Mexico at the end of the 19th century.
The Hope Suite
Displayed MAY 25, 2022 - DeCEMBER 23, 2022
The Hope Suite, by Mark L. Smith, PhD, is a series of forty-four 24” x 18” collage works on paper, each with the word “hope” in one of 44 world languages.
Reveal and Restore: Difficult History Through Art
Displayed January 12, 2022 - May 15, 2022
This exhibition features the work of Austin-based artist Nell Gottlieb. Gottlieb has worked across a variety of different media over the course of her career, from ceramics to print (both paper and textile) to multi-media work. This exhibition focuses on Gottlieb’s relationship with her 1841 ancestral home in Alabama, once a plantation and today owned and programmed as the Klein Arts & Culture.
Detail of Sarah Adelaide Chambers Skinner, Crazy Quilt, 1884. Neill-Cochran House Museum Collection
Hope for Spring: Pollinating Texas
Displayed March 12, 2022 - april 16, 2022
Celebrate spring and Texas pollinators with this juried exhibition of local artists.
Prominent Upon a Hill: The Unlikely Birth and Growth of Austin
Displayed December 2020 - May 2022
Explore Austin history from President Lamar's 1839 decision to establish a national capital out on the frontier, to the establishment of the University of Texas, to the city's segregation in the 1920s, to the explosive growth of more recent years.
Annie Lyle Harmon: On Her Own Path
Displayed September 8, 2020 - December 19, 2021
This spotlight exhibition brings together 17 paintings from one Austin collection and situates Harmon within the rapidly changing social, cultural, and environmental context of California in the post-Gold Rush era.
The Struggle and the Glory: The American Experience
Displayed June 9, 2020 - September 5, 2021
This exhibition captures the struggle and glory of living life as an African-American in the United States throughout history, along with the artist’s faith in the dream of equality and opportunity for all.
Reckoning with the Past: Slavery, Segregation, and Gentrification in Austin
DisplayED February 26, 2020 - September 5, 2021
The museum is working with students and faculty at UT-Austin to conduct research into our site’s history and into Austin history more generally, ultimately with the goal of a complete reinterpretation and reinstallation of our “Dependency,” or slave quarters. This exhibition presents for the first time our collaborative work in process, which takes our site as one microcosm for the history of labor in Austin, and connects it to the city at large as well as to national events. We hope you will return in 2021 to see the culmination of these efforts as we work to rebalance the narrative of our site as well as of Austin’s history.
INDISPENSABLES: Handbags in the Neill-Cochran House Museum Collection
Displayed May 6 - June 6, 2021
Purse…handbag…satchel…whatever we call them, we take them for granted as a part of women’s high fashion as well as a necessity of daily life. But where do they come from? This exhibition looks at a group of handbags from the NCHM permanent collection and connects them to the cultural trends that inspired their function and design.
Hope for Spring: The Flower of Texas
Displayed March 10 - April 11, 2021
Spring is nearly here! Celebrate local art inspired by the Texas bluebonnet.
Collective Voices
Displayed February 2-March 28, 2021
The project brings together the collective voices of our community who are now more distanced due to COVID-19. The public was invited to contribute a brief message about something they are grateful for that has helped them get through the current pandemic. Submissions could include a drawing, written statement, or a voice recording. The submissions were used to create four digitally created mosaics that trigger an augmented reality experience with audio. To see and hear the AR download the app Collective Voices from your app store. This project was created in conjunction withAustin Museum and Cultural Programs ArtResponders.
Rita’s Quilt: Bringing Women Together
Displayed january 7-March 28, 2021
In September 2019, Shannon Downey walked into an estate sale and stumbled upon Rita’s Quilt. What followed was an inspirational journey to complete the exquisite work of Rita Smith. Come view the incredible and intricate Rita’s Quilt and learn how it brought women from all over the world together to complete one woman’s vision.
Remembered by Hand: Family Histories Illuminated
Displayed january 6 - february 7, 2021
In a blaze of kaleidoscopic color, the late 1870s saw a fad rush in that took the United States by storm, the crazy quilt. Crazy quilts offered families the opportunity to explore modes of detailing their family history. This exhibit brings together six crazy quilts from the Neill-Cochran House Museum’s permanent collection. All of the quilts reward close inspection and speak across the 100+ years since their creation to share the stories of their makers.
If These Walls Could Talk
Displayed January 3 - July 26, 2020
The show placed ceramicist Ginger Geyer’s modern porcelain sculpture into the historic spaces of the museum.
Geyer in collaboration with actor Jennifer Rousseau Cumberbatch used the artwork as a launch pad for a series of conversations between two adolescent girls, Chlora and Ruby Virginia. The two girls, one white and one black, highlighted similarities and dissonances between past and present, high art and material culture, and experiences and treatment one would have received in a home like the NCHM Greek Revival-style mansion depending on race, class, gender, and socio-economic status through time.
THE ART OF THE JAPANESE FAN: SELECTIONS FROM THE JOSEPHINE WEST LADD COLLECTION
Displayed September 9, 2019 - February 10, 2020
From the time of Commodore Perry’s 1853 arrival in Japan, Americans’ imaginations were captivated with the style and aesthetics of Japanese folding fans. This display captures one Texan collector’s long-running fascination with folding fans of all kinds from finely made decorative objects to utilitarian equipment to tourist souvenirs.