A grand but quiet gesture
Houston art dealer’s quest fuels Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Austin’ chapel
AUSTIN — Ellsworth Kelly conceived “Austin,” the sculptural building unveiled last week on the University of Texas campus, as a place of serenity.
With its double-barrel vaulted ceiling and shape inspired by a Romanesque church, the quiet space brings important motifs of the artist’s career into focus as one transcendent gesture of form, color and light.
The late American minimalist, who died in 2015 at 92, had dreamed of producing a chapel for decades. A painter and sculptor, he initially sketched his building in 1986 for TV producer Douglas Cramer, a Kelly collector who wanted a structure for a vineyard in Santa Barbara, Calif. That never came to pass.
The story of why the university’s Blanton Museum of Art ended up with the masterpiece begins, curiously, neither in Santa Barbara nor in Austin, but in Houston, where the art dealer who would be Kelly’s agent for the project was struggling with acceptance and faith.
Cultural protest
Tempers were as hot as the temperature outside the gates of the Astrodome on the night of Aug. 17, 1992.
Inside, where the Republican National Convention was opening, conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan was sowing divisiveness, throwing salvos about a “cultural war” against those who supported abortion, radical feminism and the “homosexual rights movement.”
While real fireworks exploded above the Dome, police clashed at the gates with a crowd of about 2,000 demonstrators who were protesting the federal government’s lack of support for AIDS research.
The marchers had walked several miles, from Hermann Park, through the Texas Medical Center. Some staged a “diein.” A few burned an effigy of President George H.W. Bush.
Hiram Butler, a Houston art dealer, participated as a board member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which had set up shop for the week in his West End gallery.
The protest was fully permitted and legal, Butler said recently. “I was very careful about that.”
Then, as he remembers it, the police attacked, and he and his friends ran for their lives. He avoided arrest but was incensed and offended, mad enough to complain about the police brutality to the city council.
Like a lot of people in Houston’s gay community, Butler was fed up with so many things: the hostile rhetoric of the Bush administration, which denounced gays as enemies of “family values.” Gay bashings on the streets, including the fatal stabbing of 27-year-old Paul Broussard the previous year by two carloads of teenage boys from The Woodlands.
Less noisy deaths, too. By his early 40s, he had seen too many to count.
Butler, a native of Eagle Pass who started his career at the Museum of Modern Art, had moved back to Texas after losing all of his New York friends to AIDS. But the epidemic dragged on across Houston, too — especially in Montrose, where haunting, withered figures were seemingly everywhere one looked.
As it so happened, Butler visited Florence, Italy, and Rome soon after the convention protest. And as he viewed Italy’s largely Bible-inspired Renaissance masterpieces, he had a revelation: “You start looking at the Sistine Chapel and all the great monuments of Western civilization, and you realize that Michelangelo and Leonardo were gay.”
What was a gay man to do with such knowledge in Houston in 1992?
A place for Friends
Butler was no heathen. Raised Episcopalian but bothered by the gender-based politics of the local diocese, he had been exploring the Quaker faith because it and its Religious Society of Friends involved no clergy or hierarchy, and because they cared about gender equality and recognized gay marriage.
The intersection of art and religion fascinated Butler, and he decided to turn his frustration into action, with the Rothko Chapel as his model. He would use his blue-chip network of patrons and artists to shepherd other conceptual art buildings across Texas that would be havens of tolerance and spiritual enlightenment.
The thought stuck: “Lemme show ’em what one queer can do.”
Butler quickly orchestrated a commission for stainedglass windows at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Montrose, by New York artist Jennifer Bartlett, which was unveiled in 1995.
Five years later, the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, designed by architect Leslie Elkins, opened in the Heights. Not just drawing more Quakers to share worship, the meeting house quickly became a magnet for international art lovers who wanted to see the city’s first skyspace by James Turrell — a luminous, sublime experience that changed with each day’s setting sun.
Now, more than 20 years into his quest, Butler has five meditative spaces under his belt.
Kelly’s “Austin” is the latest.
Finding a home
Butler learned of the project that would become “Austin” almost by the grace of God in the summer of 2012.
He and his husband, Andrew Spindler-Roesle, were in New York for a memorial service and ran into Kelly and his husband, Jack Shear — with whom they were friends — on the sidewalk outside the funeral home. As they exchanged pleasantries, Butler told Kelly he was planning Turrell’s Philadelphia meeting house.
Kelly said, “You know what? I designed a chapel in the ’80s. Bring me a patron.”
“That was like catnip,” Butler said.
Because Kelly was in his late 80s by then, and in delicate health, Butler quickly engaged San Antonio architect Rick Archer and builder Tom Butler (no relation) to join him in meetings at Kelly’s New York studio.
The art dealer called Houston’s major museums first. They liked the idea but couldn’t take it on, so he pitched Kelly’s concept to a devoutly Catholic Houston couple who prefer to remain anonymous. They, too, embraced it and wanted to build Kelly’s chapel at Strake Jesuit High School in southwest Houston.
Kelly, who was an atheist, turned them down. He was inspired by religious architecture but wanted his chapel to be seen as a work of art, nondenominational and ecumenical.
Butler also shopped the project to Rice University, but he said officials there felt the design was too specific, too Christian — given the cruciform shape of the building; 14 interior panels that, though utterly abstract and minimal, were inspired by the Stations of the Cross; and the tall redwood totem that might be construed as a cross at the altar end of the building.
So Hiram Butler and Archer turned to their alma mater, the University of Texas. They had collaborated with the Landmarks public art program there to create Turrell’s “The Color Inside.”
With an assist from patrons Jeanne and Michael Klein, who got the project in front of the university president quickly, and significant support from major patrons including Houstonians Charles and Judy Tate (who gave their Latin American art collection as part of a $10 million gift to the Blanton in 2014) and the large Blanton family (also from Houston), Kelly’s project finally took off.
“It was literally a village,” said Blanton Museum director Simone Wicha, who managed the project for the university and raised more than half of the $23 million cost. “We knew if we were given the chance by Ellsworth — if he felt like we were the place because clearly he had had conversations with other institutions as well — it would be a great honor. … Having funders who stepped up early on gave weight to it as something that could be achieved. And that really mattered because of Ellsworth’s age. It would have been a lot of slower if there hadn’t been people who didn’t just get it immediately.”
No one felt that pressure more than Archer and Tom Butler and their colleagues at Overland Partners and Linbeck, who brought the artist’s concept from vision to visible, as Archer likes to say.
The artist’s crude drawings from the ’80s proposed a slightly different configuration, made of stucco. That raw plan became the jumping-off point for deep and intense collaboration, as the architect and builder and their teams talked Kelly through his options for materials he had never used before — including three window designs of meticulously colored, hand-blown stained glass; the 14 panels rendered as “paintings” of blackand-white marble; black granite floors and an exterior whose 1,569 panels of muted, gray Spanish limestone wouldn’t be too glaring in the Texas sun.
To understand what Kelly was trying to accomplish, Archer said, they needed to learn not just what Kelly was thinking but his thought process. The architect had seen meticulous before, collaborating with Turrell and other artists on previous projects, including glass master Dale Chihuly’s “Splendor on the Ceiling” at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Kelly was “the kind of artist who would stare at two canvases to decide whether the gap between them should be
2⁄16ths of an inch or 3⁄32nds of an inch,” Archer said. “But he also believed in letting things happen through chance because he wanted people to see the art, not the artist.”
That’s why the building’s stonework placement was planned digitally: The patterns were chosen randomly via an algorithm.
Wicha was great at listening and making sure Kelly’s wishes were met, Archer said.
Kelly produced “hundreds and hundreds” of drawings that the team regenerated as construction documents, so they could ensure that every detail satisfied his desire.
Yet Kelly understood the realities, too: His building had to accommodate the public, with air condititioning and auxiliary lighting; for that, he depended on the architect and contractor.
Kelly gave the work its title, following his tradition of naming works for the places they were created. But it was also deeply personal to the artist, Archer said. “He was deeply engaged in connecting it to his life.” Many of the tactile, tangible decisions he made related directly to things he loved in his home and studio.
As simplistic as Kelly’s art may look to some people, virtually every painting, drawing or sculpture he made grew from ideas that he considered his entire career.
“Austin” is a primer in several key Kelly themes: Its stainedglass designs depict his lifelong fascination with the color grid and the color spectrum. The panels mirror his most reductive, black-and-white works. The mathematically precise redwood totem, like others he designed in stainless steel, painted aluminum and bronze, represents a segment of a circle.
Even the building’s shape had been in his head for decades, referencing religious architecture he first saw in Europe as a young military artist during World War II.
Timeless eloquence
More than a thousand people lined up to experience “Austin” last Sunday, when the doors first opened to the public.
“We are very lucky to have it,” Butler said about the idea he helped bring to reality. “It’s absolutely glorious.”
Does it really all relate to that moment of awakening when he wanted to show the world what a queer could do?
“Yes!” Butler said. “There was very much a topical aspect to it, in addition to a spiritual aspect.”
Wicha credits Butler as the catalyst. “He had tremendous courage and initiative to find a home for it, truthfully, in the nick of time,” she said.
Butler is quietly pressing on to realize more chapels, including one in San Antonio that he hopes will be a commission for emerging artist Matt Kleberg. Turrell has also recently designed a private space for a River Oaks couple and a public chapel that will be built in Fort Worth.
Less developed is a project Butler has yearned to create for years, with Elkins, the architect: a synagogue designed by minimalist draftsman and sculptor Richard Serra, akin to one the artist created in Germany.
Serra isn’t getting any younger, and neither is Butler, who said, “That is what I most want to do.”
Kelly, who lived in New York and was too ill to travel during the final years of his life, never visited the city and museum that would build his final magnum opus.
The date on the “Austin” cornerstone reads “2015” because that’s when Kelly donated his only building to the Blanton. Wicha defended that decision.
“In many ways,” she said, the project was “completed” when Kelly passed away because he had selected the site and every inch of material in its 2,715 square feet. He had overseen the design of every detail, even down to the handle on the nearly invisible emergency-exit door. And ground was broken before his death.
“In a sense, he had handed it over for us to fabricate, the way any artist would do,” Wicha said.
Gray skies may have made the dancing light on the walls less intense during the chapel’s opening days than they will be on a bright summer day, but “Austin” is unquestionably a masterpiece.
The place feels timeless, really, but time will pass eloquently there.