If you’ve been hibernating during this longer-than-usual winter in Austin, now is the time to crawl out of your self-imposed cave and see some amazing art. The city is teeming with new projects that will transport your soul and awaken your mind. Here are three exceptional works to check out.

To the unknowing eye, Patrick Dougherty’s Stickwork public art installation in Pease Park looks like it could be some sort of well-preserved dwelling from prehistoric times. Design enthusiasts will likely marvel at the ingenuity behind its construction, which consists of a strong web of interwoven sticks. Kids will no doubt think it’s a cool new playscape, with windows and hallways perfect for fun games. And the conservancy behind the effort hopes it will “activate” the park, making it a destination for people from all over the city.

At a press preview about a week before the project’s public unveiling earlier this month, Dougherty, who’s based in North Carolina, talked about his process and what went into building this new work for Austin, titled “Yippee Ki Yay.”

“We’ve been saying that we wanted to make a cathedral but we only got to the corners,” he told a small crowd of journalists. “We wanted something that fit in the space, something that looked maybe like it had already been here, like a man didn’t make it, or in some ways configured accidentally, maybe the wind blew, to give it a feeling of a bit of uncertainty about its origins.”

Dougherty came to Austin in August to pick the right location for his installation in the park. He wanted it to be tucked away a little bit from Lamar Boulevard. As he usually does with his projects, he sketched out an idea for this structure and then improvised once he started construction on it and had the materials in hand. How stiff or bendable the sticks are determines much of the design. In the case of this work, saplings of depression willow and ash and an invasive species called Ligustrum were used.

“All of those are pretty dry and pretty stiff, and so we were limited to the amount of bending we could do,” Dougherty explained. He estimated 10 tons of materials were used, with Austin Tree Experts overseeing the harvesting of the saplings. They came by the trailer load from a ranch in Stonewall.

The person credited with bringing a Stickwork installation to Austin is Laurie Humphreys, a member of Pease Park Conservancy’s board and arts committee. She first saw the artist’s work at Swarthmore College, while she was living in Philadelphia. Through a foundation she started for her late son, an outdoor enthusiast, she helped get the funding to bring Dougherty to the capital city.

“When I moved back here and joined the board, I just kept seeing it in my mind here,” she told me at the press preview. “I showed [his work] to the board, they absolutely loved it, as most people do, and then I called Patrick’s assistant. She put us on the two-year waiting list for him to come. I got a phone call a couple months later from her that said, ‘Patrick is dying to come to Austin. We’re going to more you up.’”

For Dougherty, who has been making his Stickworks series for more than 30 years in cities across the world, had been wanting to come to Austin, a place he said has “such a great reputation,” for a while.

“People [in Austin] have a sense of elevated consciousness about art and music and so forth, and so it’s good to come into a place where you feel like the rest of your family lives, people who really care about art, they care about making things and the environment, all of the other issues that seem to be kind of a right-minded sense,” he said about his interest to make a project here.

It took three weeks to construct “Yippee Ki Yay,” with 200 volunteers assisting Dougherty. One of those volunteers was Susan Carpenter from Iowa. She became a fan of the artist after seeing his work in a magazine a couple years ago. She found out that the Pease Park Conservancy was seeking volunteers and applied. “Austin, Texas, in the winter? It’s a lot better than Iowa where it’s below-zero weather,” she told me. She spent a week in Austin working four-hour shifts that involved stripping leaves off branches and cutting off nubs “so nobody running along will get jabbed by them.” She wove together little pieces and helped rake and shovel mulch.

Other than igniting the imagination, there’s one other important thing to note about the work: It won’t last forever. Dougherty’s art installations have a life expectancy between 18 months and three years. There will be people making sure it’s structurally sound, but once it starts to look a little worse for wear, it will be taken down and turned into mulch for the park. So, don’t wait too long to see “Yippee Ki Yay.”

The Blanton Museum pulled off quite a coup when the artist Ellsworth Kelly gifted the museum his first and only freestanding building in 2015. Originally commissioned for a private collector, the structure was inspired by Kelly’s interest in the architecture of churches and cathedrals, particularly those in France, where he was stationed during and lived after World War II. Through a major fundraising effort, the Blanton was able to secure the needed financing to erect and maintain the 2,715-square-foot building on the University of Texas campus. Unfortunately, Kelly, at age 92, died before the work was completed. You can see Austin as you drive by on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Kelly’s modernist take on a house of worship reminds one of an igloo, as described in the New York Times, with its white façade, smooth rounded corners, clean lines, and minimal decorations. The eye is meant to focus on the light and colors. There are 14 black and white marble panels (representing the stations of the cross) adorning the walls, and instead of stained glass windows with images of saints, scriptures, or religious symbols, the glass is simple geometric shapes made of bright, solid colors.

In the middle of the space is a striking totem made of a single piece of wood. A volunteer told at the Director’s Circle event before the official unveiling to the public last week that this is the one item that is completely “irreplaceable.”

The accompanying exhibit, Form Into Spirit, is incredibly helpful for a deeper understanding and appreciation of Austin. You can see the entire history of the project, from Kelly’s early drawings of churches and cathedrals to the design of the totem as male and female forms to the selection of colors and so on. It’s definitely worth spending some time exploring and seeing how the mind of an artist works.

Like the Rothko Chapel in Houston, the best way to experience the space is quietly, with as few people as possible. Granted, interest is high at the moment, so having the space to yourself is impossible. I plan on going back once interest has died down a little. I was also told that the best times to go are early in the week and between the hours of noon and 4 p.m., on a clear day, when the sun is at its peak and the colorful windows are bursting in the light.

The University of Texas Landmarks art program, launched in 2008, has added another work to its ever-growing campus collection: José Parlá’s sweeping Amistad América. The 25-by-160-foot mural resides along the ceiling right outside a large auditorium in the still-under-construction Rowling Hall, the new McCombs School of Business graduate program building.

At the public unveiling of the artwork in late January, the New York-based artist talked about the project with author, curator, and culture critic Carlo McCormick. It was started more than four years ago, which created the first obstacle for the artist: designing a mural for a building that didn’t exist yet.

Once the Landmarks committee figured out its placement within the future building, and Parlá knew it would be in a space below ground level, he decided one of the inspirations could be cave drawings and “the time we start to record our civilization.” Other influences included his work as a graffiti artist, being a Cuban-American growing up in Miami, and the slave ship Amistad.

“But Amistad doesn’t only come from the inspiration that it’s just from a ship. It’s also the translation of Texas,” he explained to the audience. “Texas means friendship. So just the juncture of that definition and also my roots of being from a family of Cuban immigrants, that led me to think about that ship that came from the Cuban harbor and landed in the United States from the idea that they wanted the freedom to go back to Cuba. There’s a combination of a lot of thoughts that went into that.”

Another issue that came up was working with the escalators in the space. For visitors, the escalators take you down to where the auditorium is, and as you descend into the lobby outside the auditorium, the full mural slowly comes into view.

By far the largest work he has done, Parlá designed it first as a 28-foot-long model (“modelo”). “When working on the modelo, I tried to imagine myself in this space and where certain aspects of the composition would fall into the lobby outside and also around the escalators,” he said. “That was an interesting part, because you look and there’s an object [the escalators] right smack dab in the middle of your artwork. For me it was interesting to incorporate that, because it already existed.”

To construct the work, he made canvases using “elements of silkscreen and some digital printing.” These large sections were created in New York and then installed in the space. Parlá spent a month in Austin putting “final touches” on the work, with plaster being used in places where there are gestural drawings, giving it a primitive quality within it modern abstract design.

When it came time for questions from the audience, one member, who must be a professor or lecturer at McComb’s, asked the artist what he and his colleagues should be telling future MBAs about the work as they pass through this area of the building.

“I would just say share your own interpretation and feel free to share that from what you’re seeing here today and what you’re learning today,” the artist said. “I thought about this a lot in terms of where this juncture of business and art sit because some people said to me, ‘Why would you want to paint a mural in a business school?’ People might see business as the enemy. And I thought, Why not? This is a great place to have a conversation. Future business leaders will have a lot of power to make decisions that will be good for the world just as much as making mistakes. We all do, right? That’s why I wanted them to have something that would be a conversation starter. If someone wants to find out about the piece, like, What does it mean by ‘friendship America’? Isn’t the Amistad a slave ship? All the questions are important just as conversation starters. The rest is up to the many people that will come through this building and the many students that will come through this building for generations to come.”

Go check out Amistad América and see what conversations it starts for you.

Correction: A previous version of this story had the dimensions for Amistad América as 25 by 100 feet, and the modelo as 3 by 5 feet. The story has been updated with the correct information.