Marfa Art: The Complete Visitor's Guide
Donald Judd left New York for the high desert in 1971 and changed everything. Here is how to see what he built — and everything that grew up around it.
By Christian Morales
Marfa is a town of fewer than 2,000 people in the Chihuahuan Desert of far West Texas, roughly four hours from El Paso and six from Austin. It has no traffic lights and one grocery store. It is also one of the most important art destinations in the world. The reason is Donald Judd — and the peculiar gravity that serious art, in an extreme landscape, exerts on the people who seek it out.
Judd left New York in 1971. He'd grown tired of the commercial gallery system, tired of seeing his large-scale work crammed into inadequate spaces, and convinced that contemporary art deserved permanent, purpose-built homes rather than the revolving-door temporariness of the museum loan. He bought a former U.S. Army cavalry base in Marfa — Fort D.A. Russell, 340 acres of high desert — and spent the next two decades transforming it into what would become the Chinati Foundation. The foundation's most famous works are Judd's own: 100 aluminum boxes installed permanently in two converted artillery sheds, each box slightly different in its proportions, all of them gleaming in the West Texas light that Judd specifically came here to find. The sheds are enormous — you walk the length of a city block inside them — and the works shift as the light moves through the clerestory windows over the course of a day. Nothing in a photograph prepares you for the experience.
Also at Chinati: Dan Flavin's permanent fluorescent light installation in the barracks buildings (designed specifically for the space before Flavin died in 1996), John Chamberlain's crushed automobile sculptures in a dedicated building, and works by Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, and others. The campus spans the full 340 acres; a complete tour takes the better part of a day. Book Chinati tours in advance at chinati.org — they're limited in size and fill up, particularly on weekends and during Chinati Weekend (usually mid-October), when the foundation opens additional spaces and the town fills with collectors, curators, critics, and artists from around the world.
Separate from Chinati, the Judd Foundation preserves Judd's personal living and working spaces in Marfa. The Block — a cluster of buildings in downtown Marfa that Judd converted for his own use — includes his library, his studios, and the permanent installation of his furniture designs and collections. Tours reveal how completely Judd integrated art and life: every shelf, every table, every window placement was considered. The Judd Foundation also maintains 101 Spring Street in New York's SoHo, but the Marfa properties are the spiritual center.
Founded in 2003 by Fairfax Dorn and Virginia Lebermann in a converted 1927 dance hall on San Antonio Street, Ballroom Marfa has built one of the most adventurous contemporary art programs in the state. The space hosts exhibitions, film screenings, music performances, and residencies, and it operates on the conviction that Marfa's isolation is an asset rather than a liability — that artists and audiences brought together in a remote place pay a different kind of attention. Ballroom's programming is free and open to the public. Check ballroommarfa.org for the current exhibition schedule before you go.
Marfa Contemporary (107 W San Antonio St) represents emerging and mid-career artists with a serious exhibition program and residency. Wrong Gallery maintains a more provisional, project-based space. The Marfa Book Company, on Highland Avenue, is the town's cultural living room — a genuinely excellent bookshop that hosts readings, talks, and the kind of conversations that happen when artists and writers are stuck in a small town together.
On US Highway 90, about 37 miles northwest of Marfa toward Valentine, stands Prada Marfa — a permanent installation by the Norwegian-Danish artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, completed in 2005. A life-sized replica of a Prada boutique, stocked with actual Prada merchandise from the Fall 2005 collection and sealed shut, it sits alone in the desert with no explanation. It's been vandalized, repaired, and photographed by approximately everyone who has driven that stretch of highway in the past twenty years. Worth stopping for.
Marfa is roughly 3.5 hours from El Paso (fly into El Paso or Midland), 6 hours from Austin, and 4.5 from San Antonio. There is no direct public transportation. The Thunderbird Hotel (601 W San Antonio St) is the classic place to stay — a mid-century motel renovated with design intelligence. El Cosmico (802 S Highland Ave), where guests stay in vintage trailers and yurts, is more of an experience than an accommodation. Book both well in advance, particularly for fall. For dinner, Cochineal (107 W San Antonio St). For coffee, Do Your Thing. For an evening beer under the stars, Planet Marfa's outdoor bar. Spring (March–May) and fall (September–November) are the best times to go. Summers are brutally hot. Chinati Weekend, usually the second weekend of October, is the peak cultural moment — plan months ahead if you want to be there for it. Glasstire covers Marfa programming throughout the year and is worth following for advance notice.
