The initial conception of Austin was the television producer and art collector Douglas S. Cramer's request to Ellsworth Kelly to design an architectural pavilion on his vineyard near Santa Barbara, California.

[1][2] In January 2015, Kelly gave to the Blanton Museum the design concept for a 2,715 square feet (252.2 m2) stone building that he subsequently named Austin.

[6] A companion exhibition of Kelly's prints, sketches, and sculptures was displayed February 18–April 29, 2018 at the Blanton to trace the evolution of four core motifs throughout his career: spectrum, black and white, color grid, and totem.

The entry door is made from a native Texas live oak tree from the site of the Dell Medical School.

Miller in The New York Times wrote that Austinis very much the culmination of Kelly's oeuvre, not just a summation of his work's themes but his masterpiece, the grandest exploration of pure color and form in a seven-decade career spent testing the boundaries of both.

But it's possible that no contemporary artwork of this scale by a major artist has matched its creator's initial ambitions so perfectly as Kelly's Austin.