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In the elegant Montrose neighbourhood about three miles south-west of downtown Houston, the Menil Collection is one of the most architecturally distinctive private art museums in the United States. The museum opened in June 1987 to house the extraordinary 17,000-piece private art collection assembled over five decades by the Houston-based oil-industry philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil. The original museum building was designed by the celebrated Italian architect Renzo Piano with the New York firm of Richard Fitzgerald, with the elegant single-storey gabled grey-cypress-clad exterior set on a tree-shaded campus designed to feel more like a quiet neighbourhood than a major civic museum. The collection itself is one of the most internationally significant private art collections in the United States. The museum's holdings span more than seven thousand years of art history, with several internationally renowned individual collections. The European modernism collection includes major works by Picasso, Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy and a particularly strong Marcel Duchamp holding. The Surrealism collection is widely considered one of the finest in the United States. The Byzantine and Medieval art collection includes important holdings of early Christian, Coptic and Byzantine icons, alongside a small but exceptionally fine selection of medieval European illuminated manuscripts and altarpieces. The Tribal Arts collection is one of the most internationally significant in the United States, with major holdings of African, Pacific Northwest, Oceanic, Native North American and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican material. A particularly powerful adjoining Rothko Chapel, completed in 1971 and consecrated as a non-denominational meditative space, houses fourteen specially commissioned monumental black-and-aubergine canvases by the celebrated American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, designed to be viewed in the context of the chapel's octagonal contemplative interior. The adjoining Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman in the chapel's reflecting pool serves as a memorial to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The campus also includes the Cy Twombly Gallery (a single-artist museum opened in 1995 dedicated to the American abstract expressionist Twombly) and a small Byzantine Fresco Chapel. Free admission, supported by the Menil Foundation. Modestly priced public lectures and special events round out the offering.