The University of Texas has one of the largest university art museums in the country, holding more than twenty two thousand works across nearly a hundred and ninety thousand square feet, and it is free to enter. It was founded in 1963. Its real strengths are three: modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a Latin American collection that is among the most important anywhere; European painting and drawing; and prints and drawings in unusual depth. The European holdings arrived in one piece. In 1998 the museum acquired the Suida Manning Collection, some seven hundred Old Master paintings and drawings from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, assembled over two generations by the art historians William Suida and Robert and Bertina Suida Manning, and it turned a good regional museum into a serious one overnight. The building most visitors come for is a separate one on the lawn. Ellsworth Kelly designed a small stone chapel of his own, with coloured glass windows, a black and white marble floor and a redwood totem inside, and gave the design to the museum; it was completed in 2018, the year after his death, as the only building he ever designed. Standing inside it while the sun moves is the closest thing Austin has to a permanent light installation, and it is a few hundred yards from the Capitol.
Getting there
30.2810, -97.7375
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