Some 30 years in the making, Ellsworth Kelly’s chapel Austin opened in early 2018 at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Austin Texas, where it greets visitors at the south corner of campus. Although Kelly did not live to see the chapel open, the late artist was able to approve every detail of the structure before his death, at age 92, in 2015.

Kelly intended the non-denominational space to be a work of art first and foremost, but “he also wanted it to be a place that was joyful, that was calming, and that you would use for meditation, or truthfully, just going in there and taking a moment away from your day,” said Blanton Museum of Art Director Simone Wicha. Along with Austin, a number of art chapels dot the globe, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in the Vatican to Mark Rothko’s Rothko Chapel in Houston.