Plans to significantly expand the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum are continuing to drum up enthusiasm, with Historic Landmark commissioners granting the project their blessing last week.
The Umlauf Historic Preservation, Expansion, and Unification Plan hopes to add thousands of square feet in new gallery and programming space while opening up new areas of the 8-acre site to the public. Among these new spaces would be Charles and Angie Umlauf’s midcentury modern home, private garden and sculpture studio, donated to the city and immaculately preserved but currently inaccessible to visitors.
Staff says the new historic homestead would provide a closer look at the iconic sculptor, whose career reflects the spirited contemporary arts scene taking root at the University of Texas at Austin during the mid-20th century.
“The Umlauf is in possession of tens of thousands of documents and artifacts from Charles and Angeline’s life, including photographs, letters, drawings and original furniture. … The studio is filled with Umlauf’s art tools, unfinished work and fragments of sculptures,” said curator and executive director Katie Robinson Edwards. “The 60 years of objects and documents in the archives will help us reconstruct unexamined histories that have local as well as national significance.”
Connecting visitors from the existing sculpture garden to the historic homestead would be a building called the Treehouse, a three-story structure tailored to navigate the site’s lush and hilly terraces. The building would also add around 4,700 square feet of gallery space, providing a sorely needed home to the hundreds of Umlauf sculptures currently languishing in storage.
New buildings at the museum’s entrance will provide more room for staff and community programming, including summer camps, family nights, live music performances and art classes in partnership with Austin Independent School District and Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Lastly, the plan would introduce minimal landscaping and a new boardwalk to the site’s southernmost greenspace, returning 2 acres of densely vegetated parkland to the public. Tickets to the museum would not be required to enjoy the trail.
While the team is teeing up for City Council approval sometime this fall, the hard part will be cobbling together the funding. A number of Heritage Preservation grants have thus far funded some minor restoration projects, but the scale of the Vision Plan will likely mean a bond package up for a vote in 2026.
The full, 274-page plan is available to read here.
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Austin Parks Foundation: A local nonprofit that works to improve and maintain public parks, trails and other greenspaces. It was founded in 1992.
Historic Landmark Commission: The city’s Historic Landmark Commission promotes historic preservation of buildings and structures. The commission also reviews applications and permits for historic zoning and historic grants.
