Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented the inaugural David B. Warren Symposium American Material Culture and the Texas Experience in 2007. Bayou Bend, one of the great cultural treasures in the state of Texas, is renowned for its superb collection of American decorative arts and paintings. This volume of proceedings is introduced by the paper Warren presented at the first conference, an essay that provides a firm basis and raison d'etre for the symposium’s overall theme, chronicling Houston philanthropist Ima Hogg’s life-long effort to bring American colonial and Federal objects–material culture–to Texas. Additional papers by distinguished scholars Margaretta M. Lovell, the symposium’s keynote speaker, Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Lonn Taylor, and Jill Beute Koverman round out the collection, placing the pre-1900 material culture of Texas, the lower South, and the Southwest within a national and international context.