16 Archie and Dorothy Hyle Family Gallery

The Archie and Dorothy Hyle Family Gallery was established in 2007 by Dorothy Hyle and her daughter Adrienne Hyle as part of the new Mary and Morgan Jarvis Wing addition to the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, which opened in October of that year. The space was originally named the “Hyle Family Gallery,” but after her mother’s death in 2012, Adrienne renamed the gallery the “Archie and Dorothy Hyle Family Gallery” in honor of her mother’s longtime love of art and her avocation as a respected painter. Adrienne, an art major herself, said she wanted her “mother’s name in there” to counter a history of omission of women patrons of the arts.

Born in Madison, Kansas, in 1918, Archie Richard Hyle graduated in civil engineering from Kansas State University in 1943 and married Dorothy Maxine Evans in 1944. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, earning additional degrees from the University of Alabama, Georgetown University, and the National War College in Washington, D.C. He headed the Army ROTC program at K-State from 1970 – 1973.

Dorothy Maxine Evans Hyle was born in 1920 in Miami, Oklahoma, to Adren and Amber Evans, the eldest of eleven children. She attended Emporia State University for three years, leaving in 1942 to help in the war effort. After her marriage to Archie Richard Hyle in 1944, they lived in France and several U.S. locations including forty years in Manhattan, Kansas. When her husband joined the faculty at Kansas State University, she completed her degree here in 1971. She was a prolific painter and passed on her love of art to her daughter, Adrienne.

Born in 1950, Adrienne Evans Hyle studied ceramics at K-State and Japanese and Italian Baroque art at the University of Kansas. She earned a Ph.D. in educational administration from K-State in 1987 and served as professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and associate dean for Academic Partnerships and International Programs in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Texas at Arlington from 2008 to 2013. She moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she served as associate dean of graduate, research, and international studies in the College of Education at Oklahoma State University. She currently lives in Stillwater.

Because her father was so often away with his military obligations, Adrienne and her mother were especially close. In later years, they would enjoy a number of K-State Alumni Association sponsored trips together, a favorite one being Wings over the Nile. She describes her mother as a painter, seamstress, and lover of the arts. The Hyles also were passionate about helping K-State and established several scholarships. Dorothy wanted to leave a lasting legacy and, with her daughter Adrienne, provided funds that allowed them to select a space, the Hyle Family Gallery, in the new Mary and Morgan Jarvis Wing addition to the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, which opened on October 21, 2007. Adrienne requested to change the name to the Archie and Dorothy Hyle Family Gallery, its current name. The first exhibition in the gallery was Let Me Show You the World: The Sewn Drawings of China Marks.