“There's a wonderful quirkiness that has a home in Houston,” said Rebecca Rabinow, the director of the Menil Collection. Named for John and Dominique de Menil, visionary activists and collectors who moved to Houston from France during World War II, the Menil is one of the world's great museum-going experiences: Its campus of bungalows and galleries seems to grow organically out of the surrounding Montrose area. Its main lawn has become a kind of public square for picnickers, yoga groups, hippies doing circus tricks, and those just napping under the live oaks. It is also the anchor of a museum district rich with the benefits of the kind of institutional philanthropic art funding that comes with periodic oil booms. The Houston Center for Photography is nearby, as is the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Museum of Fine Art, and, most indispensably, Rothko Chapel, the artist's last commission and a place (to me, at least; part of its power is that it means different things to different people) of simultaneous melancholy and soothing.