Until 2018, many people in Austin – let alone Texas or, indeed, the world – hadn’t heard of the Blanton Museum of Art. “People couldn’t find our front door,” the museum’s director, Simone Wicha, tells Monocle. “You’d have to spend a lot of time describing where the museum was.” But when “Austin”, Ellsworth Kelly’s otherworldly art chapel, touched down among the science blocks and faculty car parks of the University of Austin at Texas (UT), giving directions became a lot easier. The chapel, which heralded the start of the Blanton’s rebirth, has now been joined by 15 12-metre-tall fibreglass “petals”, part of a $38m (€33m) transformation of the museum by Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta.

Wicha’s tenure began in 2011 and has taken in a number of destabilising challenges – turbulent Texan and national politics, coronavirus and the museum director’s perennial albatross, funding – but last year’s redesign feels like a crowning achievement. Despite being just a kilometre from the Texas Capitol, the fairly nondescript nature of the Blanton’s two buildings and the fact that they faced each other across a tree-filled plaza meant that the museum’s entrance was shrouded until the redesign. The space between the buildings became a short cut for students seeking a quick route on to campus. “Bikes were barrelling through,” says Wicha. “If you were trying to walk from one building to another, it wasn’t the safest environment.”

Wicha collaborated with Snøhetta’s founder, Craig Dykers, a UT alumnus, to reclaim the space with something bold. The resulting petals – works of art in their own right – have created both a shaded piazza (invaluable in the furnace of a Texan summer) and another impossible-to-miss Austin landmark.They are also highly innovative.Their fibreglass stems conduct heat downwards rather than radiating it out, while their hollow shafts feed rainwater into the soil – which will come as no surprise to followers of Snøhetta’s work. Neither should the incorporation of plant life into the museum’s grounds.

About 25,000 new plants – many of them drought-resistant North American species – weave around the museum’s buildings, creating a green oasis in the hot heart of the city. “I grew up in Mexico City,” says Wicha. “That sense of a place where people linger and just watch each other was really important to me. And it’s not necessarily in the fabric of all of our cities in the US. Having the Blanton be a place where art, nature and people come together was really important.”

About that art. Four new permanent installations have been created for the museum, the most eye-catching of which is Mexico-born, Texas-based Gabriel Dawe’s “Plexus No 44”, a gossamer rainbow constructed from hundreds of multicoloured threads. Like two new canary-yellow arched vaults that have replaced the old entrances, the integrated artworks bring an inviting pop of colour to the otherwise monochromatic UT campus. It is a Gesamtkunstwerk that has proven irresistible to locals. “People used to go into the galleries and then come out as quickly as they came and get into their car,” says Wicha. “Yesterday I was at the museum until it closed. The vast majority who walked out did not leave. They were either standing in groups or they went and found a chair.”

A reborn Blanton has been a boon for a city looking to pump its ample cultural muscle. Known primarily as a hub for music, in large part due to the huge success of the homegrown SXSW festival, Austin is becoming more famous for its visual arts. The Texan capital’s second gallery week took place this May and its lower rents and access to nature have become a draw for those leaving the bigger coastal cities; Austin’s metro-area population has doubled to more than two million since 2000.

It is something of a bastion of free expression in a state whose Republican government seems to be turning against the arts. In January, Texas police removed several works by photographer Sally Mann from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for their depictions of child nudity. A few months later, a bill was introduced to the state legislature that would have penalised museums for displaying material deemed obscene or harmful.This didn’t pass but it was symptomatic of a state and a country whose leaders are seeking to censure institutions, often connected to higher education, that they believe represent the “enemy within”.

This must be a tricky time to be the director of a university art museum. “It hasn’t affected the Blanton’s programme,” says Wicha. “Texas has always been a place that challenges and pushes.There were gun laws that we had to navigate that were different to what was going on in other museums around the country. There was a statewide ban on dei [diversity, equity and inclusion] that came much sooner than nationally. Some of my colleagues across the country are now having to navigate some of the same waters.” Still, while the national scene looks choppy, the people of Austin are still basking in the glow of a refurb that has put their city and its premier art museum firmly on the international map.