Posted on 01/29/2006 8:32:24 PM PST by woofie
MARFA, Texas Rolling southeast on Highway 90 from El Paso, the telephone polls blur into the horizon, white antelope tails bob near ranchers' water troughs and one Prada shoe and handbag store blurs by.
The shoe store is the first inkling that Marfa, Texas, isn't like the rest of the small towns that dot the highway to Big Bend.
One part Taos circa 1980, one part hipster New York arena, and one part dusty West Texas town, it's become almost embarrassing for an art aficionado to have not been there.
"(Marfa) has been in Paris Vogue, Dwell, New York Times and every contemporary magazine and newspaper you can think of," said Marfa art gallery owner Ree Willaford. "Anyone who's into art or design and architecture knows about it. Or should."
In the 1970s minimalist art savant Donald Judd made his home on these rolling plains of the high Chihuahuan desert. Unobstructed by the tall buildings, smog and congestion of New York, he was allowed to make his work in quiet solitude.
"That was the point," said Marfa gallery owner and ex-New Mexican, Dennis Dickinson. "Three hours across the Chihuahuan desert slows you down."
Judd was, as the story goes, tired of seeing how art galleries in New York, Los Angeles and other places showed his work. His large minimalist constructions boxes, ladders and furniture didn't look right when they were cramped up against gallery walls or poorly displayed in a museum.
So, said Nick Terry of the Chinati Foundation, which oversees the work these days, Judd went in search of a place that he could show his work in, a place that would be large and cool enough to do it justice.
He found Marfa.
With the help of the Dia Foundation of New York, Judd bought 340 acres of a former U.S. Army base.
Desert mecca
It's become an art destination for hipsters. And, like hipsters are want to do, the art elite has brought minimalist art galleries, hip hotels and gourmet restaurants that have started to sprout like the yucca in the desert.
Galleries like Ballroom Marfa, exhibitions 2d Marfa and others are gaining international reputations for important and interesting art shows.
Judd felt at home here, at home to make his groundbreaking art away from, ironically, those same art hipsters.
Even at extra-legal speeds, it's still a three-hour drive from El Paso. Then, all of a sudden, near the hamlet of Valentine, Texas (a town of 200 that's only claim to fame is its postmark), the Prada Marfa blurs by.
It's the perfect introduction to the art world of Marfa.
The replica of a Prada shoe store is an art piece, a site-specific permanent land art project by artists Elmgreen & Dragset. Built in October 2005, the store, of course, has been vandalized. Now repaired, it's set to sit the rest of days on this dusty highway. Prada Marfa was funded by the Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa.
Sure, some elements of this whole thing seem bizarre. Really, what do you do with a fake shoe store (that only has left-footed shoes) in the middle of nowhere?
Bright lights, small town
The only thing on the horizon is the mysterious Marfa Lights, a phenomenon that some say are distant car lights, but others say are ghostlike mysterious burning fireballs that have been reported in the area since the late 1800s.
"I never believed in them until I saw one, bright as the sun, run along the fence line," said Boyd Elder, a Marfa local and artist.
Marfa is one of the epicenters of the new art world, an irreverent yet serious art world that embraces projects like the Prada Marfa.
One visit to the Chinati Foundation, which maintain's the old Army base full of work by Judd and his friends, and you'll get it.
Step into the Dan Flavin hallways lit with fluorescent tubes, or the bizarre world of John Chamberlain's crushed cars and you'll understand that this isn't any Canyon Road.
Every October the town fills to the brim, doubling its size to more than 4,000, when the Chinati Foundation hosts its open house. Last year the band Yo La Tengo played at a run-down hotel.
But the new Marfa is at odds with the little town where Coors is still $2 a can at Ray's Bar.
Maybe the Loteria de Marfa says it all.
In the Brown Recluse coffee shop, near the used books and cowboy boots, the poster of the Mexican loteria card game with a Marfa twist shows "El Abogodo," or lawyer, "Un Otro Abogodao," and "El amigo de Abogado," all wearing suits, bolo ties and cowboy boots in the tongue-in-cheek version of the child's game in the local coffee shop.
Some locals don't like the changes.
"Well, there's going to be people who don't like change no matter what's going on," Willaford said.
The changes have made property values go through the roof and caused a stir about carpetbagging hipsters moving into the quaint ranches and adobes around town.
The word "chinazi" is sometimes thrown around.
Hipster hotels, with Santa Fe-priced rooms like mod The Thunderbird have replaced the old-fashioned hotels that used to line the streets of town.
Boots and books
The center of the town's activity seems to be the Marfa Book Co., an art-book store and coffee shop that must be the only place within 300 miles that you can get soy latte. Its modern furniture and bright colors are at odds with the rest of the town's brow and gray buildings. But there are still remnants of the old town. For example, vintage boots for sale at the thrift store Downtown are $12, while a coffee shop is fetching three times that for unshined boots up the street.
Today, two of the highest-profile galleries in Marfa are run by ex-New Mexicans.
Dennis Dickinson owns what could be the most Juddlike gallery in town, exhibitions 2d Marfa, which specializes in minimalist work.
His gallery, an old house that was painted white, has an assortment of simple art and high-dollar furniture that would look at home in SoHo.
"Certainly," Dickinson said, "the bigger numbers are Texans and Americans, but there are quite a number of people from around the world. There was a Japanese woman in (the gallery) a few weeks ago who was doing her dissertation on Judd's furniture."
"The work I sell here," and he sells quite a bit, he said, "is what my old boss would call 'unsalable art.' ''
A lifelong Judd fan, Dickinson once wrote a nasty letter to the Los Angeles County Museum because a Judd sculpture was dusty.
The other is Galleri Urbane, owned by Jason and Ree Willaford, who fled Silver City last year.
"(Silver City) sort of ended up getting worse instead of better, that's how we ended up in Marfa," she said. For the annual Chinati open house the Willafords rented a small gallery space in 2004. The work much of it by New Mexican artists like Peter Vofheski and Suzanne Sbarge and Jason Willaford sold.
"We slept in back. We had coolers of food. It was definitely the guerrilla gallery. We sold a lot of work and didn't know we would," she said. "We had a great time and met a lot of great people."
Not long after that, the Willafords moved to Marfa.
"You know it's funny," she said. "It's really good in Marfa."
Wow.
They have a museum with a bunch of that really crappy artwork where someone makes a big concrete block and calls it "The Sorrow of Third World Chilren" and other such dreck.
Art Ping
Ya want on this List? Buy some art then notify Sam Cree, Republican Professor, or me
Wow. This will piss Dad off, almost as much as "a study in white."
"All made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same ... little boxes ... "
Thanks for the pix. Saw the boxes long ago in TX Monthly but had not gotten to feast my eyes and fix my gaze upon the lovely Prada left-shoe store. How nice.
Perhaps it's good they have the MarfaFest in October, so that visitors can also spend their evening time looking for the Marfa Lights--that's prime time. I hope to be so lucky some day.
Another 100 miles or so south and they can also make the Terlingua Chili cookoff in time for the Halloween contest and then the championship cookoff first weekend of November.
Marfa is also where they filmed "Giant" with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean
My dad lives near Marfa and says about this: they wish.
If you've never been to Marfa, you don't realize how small and poor it is. It has a store, but it's not much better than a 7-11. None of the infrastructure they need to become a real art colony - interesting place. And you do best to have some Spanish.
Harper Springs, VA
I haven't heard of it.
Little place my folks wanted to buy into, years ago. Turned into a huge art colony. Can't touch it for a million, now.
But I oopsed - it is in WVA.
aaaaarrrrrrgh - Harper's Ferry, WVA. Late, and I just got home from NY.
I know! One of my all-time faves. Shall I run some lines of it for you? LOL
Bick and Leslie and Luz and Jordy and Jett Rink. Bick meeting Leslie in Maryland and their beautiful showplace of a horse farm. The train ride to Texas.
The Shamrock Hotel opening was one of my favorite scenes, I think. No, wait, the part where Liz Taylor is given the honor of scooping the brains out of the calf skull at the BBQ on the Reata. No, maybe when Jett hit the first gusher. Or, no, when Sal Mineo came home in the flag-draped coffin on the train after the war. Or when the little diner (probably in Marfa) refused to serve Bick because of Jordy's little babies and grandaddy Bick decked somebody.
Maybe not a great movie to everyone else, but I love it.
Marfa is near the Mexican border. It's a small community like most things in Jeff Davis County. My dad's town's on it, and it's just a wide spot in the road that wouldn't be mentioned if there were more people there.
The real draw is Ft. Davis and various dude ranches and the the UT-McDonald Observatory. There are not much more than 2200 people in the entire county. About half of them are in Ft. Davis.
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?city=fort%20davis&state=TX&zoom=4
http://community.txed.state.tx.us/communities/commpages/364.htm
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/48243.html
If they could make it it would be good for the county, but I am not holding my breath. What they do have going for them is the Ft. Davis draw, and the Big Bend park traffic and the reputation of the Marfa lights, and that right now it is cheap to live there.
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