Museumsnineteen in a mile and a half

John and Dominique de Menil dedicated this nondenominational chapel in 1971. Philip Johnson drew the first plans, and Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry finished it as architects of record. Inside are 14 paintings Rothko completed in 1967 for this exact room: seven hard-edged black rectangles on maroon grounds and seven tonal purple canvases. At first they read as nearly black. Sit on a bench for ten minutes and the color starts to move. A 2020 restoration replaced the skylight with a perforated scrim that finally softens the Texas sun the way Rothko wanted. Hurricane Beryl pushed water into the building in July 2024. The chapel reopened that December, and the three-panel east wall triptych went to conservators off site. Outside, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., balances its tip on a pyramid above a reflecting pool. The chapel also keeps holy books of many faiths, from the Bible to the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita.

Time

30 minutes to 1 hour

Price

Free

Hours

Tue-Sun 10 am-6 pm, including holidays; closed Mon. Grounds open daily dawn to dusk.

Best time

Weekday late morning, or late afternoon when the skylight light is at its softest

• 1971Dedicated
• 14, completed 1967Rothko paintings
• About 100,000Visitors a year
• 2020Skylight restored

In 1925 Ima Hogg and her brothers Will and Mike picked 14 acres of woods and ravines in a bend of Buffalo Bayou. Architect John Staub built her house there in 1927 and 1928, and she spent decades filling it with the best American furniture, silver, ceramics and paintings she could find, made between 1620 and 1870. She gave all of it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1957, and it opened to the public in 1966. Today nearly 2,600 objects fill 28 period rooms that walk you from Colonial New England to the Victorian parlor. The gardens matter just as much. Hogg treated them as outdoor rooms for living, planted magnolias and camellias, and is credited with bringing azaleas to Houston. In 2001 Bayou Bend became the first formal public garden in Texas to go organic. Start at the Kilroy Visitor Center on Memorial Drive for the orientation films and the Hogg Family Legacy Room.

Time

2 to 3 hours

Price

Adults $14; students, seniors 65+ and youth 13-18 $12; children 12 and under, MFAH members and active military free (includes gardens; 2026 listed price)

Hours

Wed 10 am-3 pm; Thu-Sat 10 am-5 pm; Sun 1-5 pm; closed Mon-Tue. Last admission one hour before closing.

Best time

Spring for the azaleas, or a Thursday or Friday morning any time of year

• 14 acresGardens
• Nearly 2,600 in 28 roomsObjects on view
• 1957Given to MFAH
• 1966Opened to public

The idea for this museum took shape in Houston in 1981, and it opened in 1996. A $34 million expansion reopened it in June 2019 at 57,000 square feet on the Lester and Sue Smith Campus, fully bilingual in English and Spanish. The core gallery, Bearing Witness: A Community Remembers, builds its history around people who later settled in Houston, and it moves you past two objects that stop almost everyone: a German railcar like those used for deportations, and the Danish rescue boat Hanne Frank, a reminder of the 1943 boatlift that carried most of Denmark's Jews to safety in Sweden. The Lester and Sue Smith Human Rights Gallery widens the lens to genocides and rights movements since. The Samuel Bak Gallery holds the survivor-painter's haunting work, and the Caress Gallery, And Still I Write, gathers diaries kept by young people in war. Give yourself time; it is heavy, and it is meant to be.

Time

2 to 3 hours

Price

Adults $22; seniors 65+ and active-duty military $16; ages 18 and under and college students with ID free; free for all Thu 2-5 pm (2026 listed price)

Hours

Tue-Sat 10 am-5 pm; Sun noon-5 pm; closed Mon (open MLK Day). Last entry 4:30 pm.

Best time

Thursday after 2 pm for free entry, or a weekday morning

• 1996; expanded 2019Opened
• 57,000 sq ftSize
• 4th-largest US Holocaust museumNational rank
• Thursdays 2-5 pmFree entry

Seven Houstonians founded CAMH in 1948, and since 1972 it has lived in Gunnar Birkerts's building: a parallelogram wrapped in corrugated stainless steel, its sharp corner pointed at the Montrose and Bissonnet intersection. There are no windows, so curators control every inch of light. CAMH does not collect. It borrows, commissions and debuts, which means the shows turn over completely and you rarely see the same thing twice. The two floors run separate exhibitions. Through November 1, 2026, the upstairs Brown Foundation Gallery holds Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, a survey of her work on land, housing and environmental questions. Downstairs in the Zilkha Gallery, Divination: Beverly Buchanan and Dionne Lee (September 4, 2026 to February 14, 2027) looks at myth and loss in the American landscape. Pair it with the MFAH across the street and the Menil a short drive north.

Time

45 minutes to 1.5 hours

Price

Free

Hours

Wed-Sun 11 am-6 pm (Thu until 9 pm); closed Mon-Tue and major holidays

Best time

Thursday evening, or pair it with a morning at the MFAH across the street

• 1948Founded
• Gunnar Birkerts, opened 1972Building
• None: non-collecting museumCollection
• Always freeAdmission

In 1993 seven Black artists, Rick Lowe, Bert Long Jr., James Bettison, Jesse Lott, Floyd Newsum, Bert Samples and George Smith, bought 22 run-down shotgun houses on a block and a half at Holman and Live Oak. Their mentor, the painter John Biggers, had long painted the shotgun house as a symbol of Black community life, and the founders took him literally. Today Project Row Houses covers five city blocks and 39 properties: artist studios, small businesses, a public art park and the Historic Eldorado Ballroom, which PRH preserves and still fills with music nights. The art houses run in rounds. Twice a year, seven houses are handed to visiting artists who rebuild them from the inside. Round 61, the Southern Survey Biennial III, opens October 3, 2026 and runs to February 14, 2027, with artists from across the American South. Walk it slowly; some houses are private homes.

Time

1 to 1.5 hours

Price

Free

Hours

Wed noon-5 pm; Thu 9 am-6 pm; Fri-Sun noon-5 pm; closed Mon-Tue

Best time

Saturday, or the opening day of a new artist round

• 1993 by seven artistsFounded
• 22 shotgun housesFirst purchase
• 5 blocks, 39 propertiesCampus today
• Round 61, Oct 3, 2026-Feb 14, 2027Current round

Before this building, Americans knew Yoshio Taniguchi for his renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Asia Society Texas, opened April 14, 2012, was his first freestanding building in the country, and the materials are the show. The walls are Jura limestone from Germany, fossil-flecked and warm; quarriers cut 470 blocks to find 50 good enough. The grand hall is paneled from a single cherry tree more than a century old. Upstairs, the Louisa Stude Sarofim Gallery hosts two or three exhibitions a year of traditional and contemporary Asian and Asian American art, and the Explore Asia exhibition fills the North Gallery. Step out to the water garden terrace: 12,000 gallons of recirculating water, three spouts and bursts of artificial fog, with downtown framed by oaks beyond. In the sculpture garden sits Lee Ufan's Relatum - signal, his first commissioned work for a U.S. public institution.

Time

1 to 1.5 hours

Price

See It All $15, students $8; single exhibitions $8; free for ages 6 and under; free exhibition admission Thursdays (2026 listed price)

Hours

Wed 10 am-5 pm; Thu noon-7 pm; Fri-Sun 10 am-5 pm; closed Mon-Tue

Best time

Thursday afternoon for free admission and golden light on the terrace

• April 14, 2012Opened
• Yoshio TaniguchiArchitect
• 40,000 sq ftSize
• 12,000 gallonsWater garden

The Moody opened on February 24, 2017, a 50,000-square-foot building by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan, and every exhibition and most programs are free. It mounts three shows a year. Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas runs September 4 to December 19, 2026. The Moody also looks after more than 85 public artworks across Rice's 300-acre campus. The one to plan your evening around is James Turrell's Twilight Epiphany, built in 2012 beside the Shepherd School of Music. It is a grassy pyramid that seats 120 on two levels under a 72-foot square roof with a knife-thin edge and an open square cut to the sky. At sunrise and sunset, LED light washes the ceiling while the sky through the opening seems to change color on its own. It is Turrell's 73rd Skyspace and the first engineered for acoustics. Each sequence lasts about 40 minutes, and it runs rain or shine.

Time

1 to 2 hours

Price

Free (Moody galleries and Skyspace); campus parking about $12 daily maximum

Hours

Moody galleries Tue-Sat 10 am-5 pm, closed Sun, Mon and holidays. Skyspace open daily 6 am-10 pm, with light sequences at sunrise and sunset.

Best time

Late afternoon in the galleries, then the Skyspace sunset sequence

• February 24, 2017Moody opened
• 2012, Turrell's 73rdSkyspace built
• 120 on two levelsSkyspace seats
• 72-foot square, knife-edgeRoof

Its motto is Any day above ground is a good one, and the museum lives up to it. Since 1992 it has filled 30,500 square feet off I-45 north with 15 permanent exhibits. Presidential Funerals holds the bill for George Washington's funeral, the original eternal flame from John F. Kennedy's grave at Arlington, and the hearse that carried Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford in California. The papal gallery covers 5,000 square feet and includes a full-scale replica of Saint John Paul II's original crypt. A Life Well Lived shows 12 fantasy coffins from Ghana, each carved to capture its owner's trade or dream. Historical Hearses runs from horse-drawn carriages to the car used at Grace Kelly's funeral. There is a Day of the Dead gallery, a 9/11 tribute and, since 2023, a certified replica of the Shroud of Turin. It sounds morbid. It plays like a history museum with a sense of humor.

Time

2 to 4 hours

Price

Adults $15; seniors 55+ and veterans $12; children 6-11 $7; 5 and under free (2026 listed price)

Hours

Mon-Fri 10 am-4 pm; Sat 10 am-5 pm; Sun noon-5 pm

Best time

Weekday afternoon; the Day of the Dead gallery is especially timely around November 1-2

• 1992Open since
• 30,500 sq ftExhibit space
• 15Permanent exhibits
• 12Ghana coffins

John Milkovisch retired from upholstering for the Southern Pacific Railroad and, in 1968, started pressing marbles, rocks and bits of metal into concrete and redwood around his yard. When the yard was covered, because he got sick of mowing the grass, he turned to the house. Over 18 years the bungalow disappeared under flattened beer cans. Garlands cut from can tops hang from the eaves, and they did two jobs: they made the house sing in the wind and they cut the family's energy bills. Ripley's Believe It or Not estimated more than 50,000 cans. The brand never mattered; his favorite beer was whatever was on special. After John and his wife Mary died, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art restored the house and opened it for tours in 2008. Its sister site, Jeff McKissack's Orange Show Monument in the East End, is closed for restoration, but Smither Park next door to it is open daily.

Time

30 minutes to 1 hour

Price

Free

Hours

Wed-Sun 10 am-4 pm; closed Mon-Tue, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day

Best time

A breezy weekday morning, or a quarterly block party Sunday

• 1968Started
• More than 50,000Cans (Ripley's estimate)
• 18Years of canning
• Since 2008Open for tours

Carroll Sterling Masterson and Harris Masterson III spent more than 40 years collecting European furniture, paintings, porcelain and miniatures made between the 1600s and the mid-1800s, and they lived with all of it. John Staub, the same architect who built Bayou Bend, designed their house in 1952. The family used it until 1997, when it went to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; it opened to the public in 1999. Unlike the formal period rooms at Bayou Bend, Rienzi still feels lived in, down to the Mexican Room the Mastersons added in the 1970s. Landscape architect Ralph Ellis Gunn designed the 4.4 acres of gardens in the 1950s, working formal beds into steep ravines that drop to Buffalo Bayou. Through January 10, 2027, the exhibition Midcentury Menu: Dining in the Atomic Age uses Rienzi's cookbook collection to look at Jell-O salads, new appliances and postwar entertaining.

Time

1 to 1.5 hours

Price

Adults $10; seniors 65+ $8; college students and youth 13-18 $5; children 12 and under, MFAH members and active military free; gardens free (2026 listed price)

Hours

House Thu-Sat 10 am-5 pm, Sun 1-5 pm; closed Mon-Wed and all of August. Gardens Mon-Sat 10 am-4:30 pm, Sun 1-4:30 pm.

Best time

Spring, when the gardens are at their most colorful; pair with Bayou Bend, about two miles away

• 1952, John StaubHouse designed
• 1999Opened as museum
• 4.4 acresGrounds
• Free dailyGardens