New Grounds Initiative

New Grounds Celebrations

Reimagined. Refreshed. Recreated.

Austin’s art museum is changing, and soon you’ll get to experience it in a completely new way. From the moment you step onto our revitalized grounds, you’ll feel the difference — how the artistic spirit inside the Blanton’s galleries has been extended throughout the museum’s outdoor areas. From the elegant shade canopy that stretches to the big Texas sky, to the colorful native plantings, to bold art installations, the new Blanton grounds will welcome and invite you in like never before!

Our new grounds initiative was designed to unify and revitalize the Blanton campus — which is approximately 200,000 square feet and contains two buildings and Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin — through architectural and landscape improvements and art. We’re delighted to be working on the project with the acclaimed international design firm Snøhetta; we’re especially proud that lead architects Craig Dykers, John Newman, and Elaine Molinar are UT Austin alumni. Hook ’em!

One of the highlights of this project is an expansive, dynamic work of art — specifically, the first major public mural commission by noted Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, an acquisition made possible with the generous support of the Kahng Foundation. Titled Verde que te quiero verde (Green How I Desire You Green), the mural will grace the outside walls of the Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building, spanning both sides of the entrance; you can read more about it below. There will be additional public art installations to experience when the project is completed in spring 2023. Stay tuned for future announcements!

“I believe that landscape has the power to transform a community, very much in the way that great art can transform our hearts and minds. The museum’s new grounds initiative designed by Snøhetta and the public mural by visionary artist Carmen Herrera will transform the Blanton, opening the museum into the city, inviting people in not just to see great art, but also to linger, gather, and be inspired before and after each visit. We want to create a destination — a beloved destination — for families, students, tourists, and art lovers alike.

Of course, an undertaking of this scale would not be possible without the incredible generosity of the Moody Foundation, with special thanks to Trustee Elle Moody for her immediate enthusiasm for this initiative. This project is also being realized thanks to the support of the Still Water Foundation, an estate gift from beloved former docent Ann Bower, and other donors.“

—Simone Jamille Wicha, Director of the Blanton Museum of Art

You can learn more about the project by exploring this page, viewing the gallery of architectural renderings below, reading the press release, and watching our Virtual Groundbreaking Celebration, a free online event that took place March 9, 2021.

View from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard looking north toward the Faulkner Gateway, and “Austin” by Ellsworth Kelly, with the Edgar A. Smith Building on left and the Mari and James Michener Gallery with Carmen Herrera’s mural commissioned by the Blanton with generous funding from the Kahng Foundation in the loggia on right.

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Public Art

Butler Sound Gallery: The Blanton will become the first major museum to create a long-term space dedicated to sound art, following a $5 million gift from Ernest and Sarah Butler. The future site of the Butler Sound Gallery will be a park-like area on the museum campus and will be an integral feature of the Blanton’s large-scale grounds revitalization led by acclaimed international design firm Snøhetta. The outdoor gallery will open with a site-specific installation by sound art pioneer Bill Fontana that incorporates recordings of Central Texas wildlife and its distinct geological structures taken over the course of four seasons.

Landscape Soundings (working title) will transport the ecological zones of the Texas Hill Country to the heart of Austin, creating an inviting outdoor space and furthering the museum’s goal of bringing art beyond its building walls and into communal areas.

The gift includes an endowment for future site-specific sound art installations for the gallery, ensuring that visitors will experience a dynamic program for many years to come.

Ernest and Sarah Butler at the 2019 Blanton Gala.

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Carmen Herrera Mural: One of the most exciting additions to the redesigned grounds is the site-specific mural by renowned Cuban-American abstract painter Carmen Herrera, her first major public mural commission. The title, Verde que te quiero verde, translates to Green How I Desire You Green, and comes from the poem Romance sonámbulo by Federico García Lorca. The visual forms in the mural reference a painting by Herrera titled Green and White from 1956. The artwork will be sited on the interior wall under the Michener Gallery Building’s loggia, spanning the length of the building, with the museum’s entrance in the middle.

Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera sold her first painting in 2004, when she was 89 years old. “There’s a saying that you wait for the bus and it will come,” she said recently. “I waited almost a hundred years!” This first sale signalled a shift in her career. She was soon recognized as one of the greatest undiscovered secrets in the history of Cuban art, and increasingly gained the spotlight after her retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016-17.

Having first studied architecture at the University of Havana in the late 1930s, Herrera lived and worked in Paris from 1948 to 1954, before settling definitively in New York. While in Paris, she was part of a group of abstract painters who exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. This was the important post-war Parisian successor to geometric abstract art movements whose lineages reached as far back as De Stijl, Constructivism, and Concrete Art of the 1910s. Herrera exhibited there from 1949 to 1952, and recalls about an encounter at the Salon: “One of the founders of the group said to me, ‘Madame, but you know you have so many things in that painting,’ and I felt very good about the compliment. But then I realized that he was trying to tell me that I was putting too much in the painting.”

Such formative experiences led Herrera to a process of distillation and purification of her art, as well as a recovery of the straight lines and sharp angles of her architectural training, that constituted a turning point in her practice. The pivotal White and Green series that she worked on sporadically between 1959 and 1971 grew organically from this process. In this series, Herrera first began to play with expansive fields of monochromatic color bisected by angular forms that would become her signature style. She also began to paint her frames, treating the entire canvas as a three-dimensional object, foreshadowing her sculptural Estructuras (Structures) begun in the mid-1960s. Remember that the precise painting that gave rise to the Blanton’s mural is conversely titled Green and White and dates to 1956. One of her first experiments in this new, pared-down geometric language, it is also one of the only canvases of this period painted entirely green with dynamic white angles whirling across the picture plane. Repeated throughout the Blanton’s signature loggia, it will activate the space at the same time that it celebrates the long and lasting legacy of a painter who revolutionized the practice of geometric abstraction in Havana, New York, and beyond—albeit quietly—for decades.

“It is an honor that my first major public mural commission will be with the Blanton Museum of Art, an institution that I have admired and respected for decades. As a museum that has long been at the forefront of collecting work by artists of Latin American descent, as well as the place where Ellsworth Kelly realized his last great work of art, entering the collection at this moment marks a high point in my long career.”

– Carmen Herrera

This major Blanton acquisition is made possible thanks to generous support from the Kahng Foundation.

Detail of Carmen Herrera mural commissioned by the Blanton and made possible with generous funding provided by the Kahng Foundation, near the entrance of the Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building.

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Other Art Installations: Several additional works of art, to be announced in coming months, will be installed throughout the grounds, providing exciting new ways for our community to engage with art beyond the Blanton’s gallery walls.

Landscaping

Overview: The Lone Star State is home to a wide variety of trees, bushes, flowers, and grasses that are both beautiful and hardy, and the landscaping for the new grounds initiative draws on the unique character and resilience of native Texas flora. Throughout the museum walkways and gardens, more than 25,000 new plants will be added, 95% of which are native to the state. You can learn about a few of the landscaping highlights below.

Heritage and Shade Trees: Whether you’re arriving from the Brazos Garage or strolling down MLK Jr. Boulevard, you’ll get to enjoy a variety of trees providing both visual interest and shade from the bright Texas sun. The new pathway from the garage to the museum entrances will take you through a grove of long-standing heritage trees (trees with trunk diameters exceeding 24 inches), including several stately Southern live oaks. Coming up the stairs of the Faulkner Gateway, you’ll be greeted by smaller ornamental trees and plantings. Similar landscaping will enhance and shade the outdoor café seating, as well.

Native Plants: Wherever you wander throughout the new Blanton grounds, you’ll enjoy plantings and small gardens filled with native species. Among them: dwarf palmetto, Texas gold columbine, and Cherokee sedge.

SITES Certification: The design’s focus on sustainability has been developed with an eye toward SITES certification.

Support

Lead funding for the new grounds initiative is generously provided by The Moody Foundation. Major funding is also provided by Sarah and Ernest Butler, the Still Water Foundation, and the Estate of Ann Bower. Further support is thanks to the Kahng Foundation, Sally and Tom Dunning, Jack and Katie Blaha, the Lowe Foundation, Gwen White Kunz and Walter White, and other donors.

If you are interested in helping to support this transformational project, please email us at development@blantonmuseum.org.