A former daycare building at 2600 Rosewood Avenue in East Austin has been reborn as a collector-led contemporary art foundation, and it opens its doors to the public on September 19. Ostillo Art Foundation will mark the occasion with free admission, a free outdoor concert, and an inaugural exhibition stacked with international blue-chip names.
A Former Daycare Becomes a Gallery Campus
According to austin.culturemap.com, Ostillo Art Foundation will open its doors to the public with free admission, offering an exhibition space, a public library, and an open-air performance space on the Rosewood Avenue campus. The foundation describes itself as a collector-led art institution dedicated to expanding public access to contemporary art, ideas, and cultural programming. The site's transformation from a childcare facility into an arts campus is detailed by the HENI News, which reports the grand opening date and the building's prior commercial use.
The foundation traces back to 2016, when Austin-based developer and art collector René Campos began assembling the collection in Paris alongside founding director and chief curator Sacha Zerbib, according to the Ostillo Art Foundation. Zerbib previously held roles at Sotheby's and Galerie Nathalie Obadia before co-founding Octobre Art Advisory, per the same foundation. The name itself carries a layered meaning: as CultureMap Austin reports, Ostillo derives from 16th-century Italian mathematician Ostilio Ricci, who mentored astronomer Galileo Galilei, with one letter altered to reveal the word “Still,” meant to reflect art's ability to hold a viewer's attention.
Inaugural Show Tackles Identity Through Masks
The opening exhibition, titled “Masquerade,” explores themes of identity and masking through works by international contemporary artists including Kader Attia, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, Thomas Schütte, and Christopher Wool, according to HENI News. The exhibition's title draws inspiration from a Glenn Ligon silkscreen featuring text from James Baldwin's 1953 essay Stranger in the Village, the outlet notes.
Ostillo will offer free admission and free on-site parking while operating weekly from Friday through Sunday, with seasonal closures throughout July and August, per the Ostillo Art Foundation. austin.culturemap.com adds that the grand opening schedule remains subject to change due to weather or other concerns.
Free Soul Festival Kicks Off the Celebration
The grand opening will feature the free Rosewood Soul Festival from 5 to 9:30 p.m., showcasing live music by artist Lonnie Holley, blues artist Keith Dunn, and soul musicians Stan Mosley & The Moeller Brothers, according to Visit Austin. Holley, an acclaimed Alabama-born modern artist and musician, is returning to Austin for the performance, the tourism organization notes.
That musical throughline extends beyond opening night. Ostillo's outdoor performance venue will serve as the permanent home of the Eastside Kings Festival, an East Austin event celebrating African American blues, jazz, and gospel traditions, according to The Austin Chronicle. The festival's 14th edition takes place October 17 and 18, and it was created by Dialtone Records founder Eddie Stout to support local blues musicians, the paper reports.
Lectures and Neighborhood History
Starting October 31, Director of Exhibitions Dr. Jean Capeille will lead a free monthly public lecture series running through June 2027, examining 20th-century American vaudeville and traditions of spectacle alongside guided gallery tours, according to the Ostillo Art Foundation. The lectures take place one Saturday per month at 5 p.m. with no advance prerequisites, the foundation notes.
Ostillo's location places it squarely within a neighborhood shaped by discriminatory city planning. Rosewood sits in an area profoundly affected by Austin's 1928 Master Plan, which enforced municipal segregation by establishing a six-square-mile “Negro district” east of East Avenue, according to KVUE. That 1928 plan restricted municipal services elsewhere in Austin to force Black residents onto the east side, the station reports.
Nearby Rosewood Park, established by the City of Austin in 1929 as the municipality's first public park designated for African Americans, remains a central neighborhood anchor that developed around the 1870s Bertram-Huppertz homestead, according to the City Parks Alliance. Ostillo's arrival lands in a neighborhood where real estate growth is increasingly intersecting with fine arts institutions, a dynamic that positions the foundation's free programming and music partnerships as an attempt to stay rooted in Rosewood's Black cultural history even as the area changes around it.
