40 Th Anniversary

The Spirit of the Wittliff in 40 Objects gathers forty unique, fascinating objects from the Wittliff’s Southwest Writers Collection, Texas Music Collection, and Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection. Together, these objects tell the story of the archive’s mission and spirit. 

From the guitar pick with which Stevie Ray Vaughan played his last concert to correspondence between writer Elizabeth Crook and Jackie Onassis, her editor at Doubleday, the exhibition showcases the breadth and depth of the Wittliff Collections holdings of the Southwest’s most significant creative artists.

The Wittliff Collections was founded in 1986 when screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff and his wife, Sally, donated their growing archive of Southwestern literary manuscripts—starting with the papers of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie—to the university’s library, creating what was then the Southwestern Writers Collection. 

Over the following decades the archive expanded to include Southwestern & Mexican photography and, later, the Texas Music Collection. Now a nationally and internationally renowned research center, archive, and museum, The Wittliff preserves and shares the cultural heritage of Texas, the Southwest, and Mexico through primary materials spanning writing, photography, music, and film. Today the Wittliff holds more than 500 collections used worldwide by scholars, artists, and the public for research and inspiration.