This paper addresses the indeterminacy and uncertainty of a site-specific, religious meaning which has been believed to be inherent in the Rothko Chapel paintings. Commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil in 1964 for a Catholic university, the chapel was Rothko's last and most important project to realize his life-long aspiration for a contemplative, environmental, permanent installation of his work. Created for a specific site and framed in religious terms, the Rothko Chapel paintings have been normally understood to deliver or communicate their spiritual meaning in the specific architectural setting of the Catholic chapel. Although it was dedicated in 1971 as an ecumenical chapel freed from any denominational ties, religious interpretations closely related to, and enhanced by, structural analyses of the architecture have dominated art-historical studies of the Rothko Chapel. Reflecting critically on this normative approach to the chapel paintings and their site-specificity, which I call a unified “inner or internal” interpretation, I intend to cast light on what could be seen as“ external or prior” to the work, which would result in a more fragmented, ununified reading. More specifically, I explore exterior or prior factors on two levels, the traces of which are embedded in the chapel paintings: on the one hand, Rothko's New York studio as a matrix in which the paintings were conceived, executed, and completed as an ensemble, and on the other hand, the historical context of 1960's abstraction against which Rothko's monochromes and hard-edge black-figure canvases could signify and assert any meanings. I suggest these two readings from without as an alternative to structural readings from within, such as Sheldon Nodelman's in-depth formal analyses and structural interpretations of the installation program. My alternative readings would illuminate how, in the chapel paintings, multiple voices and traces of others coexist with the artist's singular voice and his own hands. All in all, instead of claiming any single primary meaning, I aim to deconstruct the boundaries between formalist and contextual readings of the Rothko Chapel, and contribute to expand the interpretive horizon of the chapel paintings' structure and meaning.