Ellsworth Kelly Designs Austin Chapel
Big news! The 91-year-old Color Field artist has given the University of Texas’s Blanton Museum of Art an unrealized design for a chapel first conceived for a private collector in 1986. For the past two years, Kelly’s been working with the museum to finally bring the now-titled Austin chapel to pass. The 2,715-square-foot stone chapel is particularly special because it’s the only freestanding building that Kelly has ever designed. His characteristic shape-paintings will also find form in stained glass windows — the artist’s very first attempt to realize his aesthetic vision through light. These will fill three of the building’s four chancels, with the fourth housing a towering redwood totem. Fourteen black-and-white marble panels will also hang on the walls. Kelly explained that the structure’s Romanesque architecture was inspired by the years he spent in Paris after the Second World War studying art on the G.I. Bill.
