The Rothko Chapel received a $2 million grant from Houston Endowment for the restoration and expansion project underway at the chapel campus in Montrose.

Having raised over $12.5 million, the Rothko Chapel is approaching its fundraising goal for Phase 1 of the Opening Spaces campaign, the $30 million capital campaign supporting the multiyear campus master plan, according to a July 15 press release. Houston Endowment’s $2 million grant is the second-largest institutional grant the Rothko Chapel has received for the current fundraising effort, David Leslie, executive director of the Rothko Chapel, told the Houston Business Journal.

The Brown Foundation Inc. gave a $2.5 million gift last spring, Leslie said. Other contributors include the Cullen Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the John R. Eckel Jr. Foundation, the Rosenblatt Charitable Trust, the John P. McGovern Foundation and the Ann and J. Kent Friedman/Esther Friedman Family Foundation, per the release.

The Rothko Chapel has raised some 90 percent of the $15 million needed for the first phase of construction and restoration, Leslie said. This first phase includes restorations to the chapel itself, such as work on the skylight, lighting design and the chapel entryway. Leslie said that Phase 1 also includes new construction and campus improvements, including a new visitor welcome center, an above-ground energy house, water resiliency and retention improvements, and landscaping enhancements.

Once Phase 1 is completed, the $15 million Phase 2 project will include a new administrative and archives building, as well as a new programming center that will be connected to the above-ground energy house, Leslie said. The Rothko Chapel also plans to renovate one of its bungalows into a guest residence for speakers during the second phase.

“The Houston Endowment, along with these other major institutional supporters, are very important,” Leslie told the HBJ. “They’re clear affirmations of the importance of the Rothko Chapel in the fabric of arts, culture, human rights and spirituality in our city and metropolitan area.”

The Rothko Chapel, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2021, closed in March for the first phase of construction and will remain closed until December 2019. New York-based Architecture Research Office is serving as the principal architecture firm, Washington, D.C.-based George Sexton Associates is the lighting designer, and Virginia-based Nelson Byrd Woltz, which has a Houston office, is the landscape architecture firm on the project. The chapel originally was designed by architects Philip Johnson, Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry in close collaboration with Rothko.

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“Houston Endowment envisions Houston as a vibrant community where all people have the opportunity to thrive, and a vibrant community needs a strong arts ecosystem,” Long Chu, program officer at Houston Endowment, said in the press release. “Fulfillment of the master plan will elevate Rothko Chapel’s role as one of Houston’s significant cultural institutions and expand its ability to contribute to Houston’s vibrancy.”

Well over 100,000 people representing 100 countries visited the Rothko Chapel in 2018, Leslie said. He said that the number of visitors to the chapel at 1533 Sul Ross St. continues to increase at a pace of around 10 percent a year. The Rothko Chapel was founded in 1971 by Houston philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil as an interfaith, nonsectarian sanctuary, per the release.

Houston Endowment is planning for a major construction project itself — the nonprofit intends to build a $20 million, 40,000-square-foot headquarters at 3615-3683 Willa St., near the intersection of Memorial and Waugh on a site that overlooks Spotts Park.