On the Ground in Marfa and London

On Saturday morning, Donald Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum was glimmering in the Marfa sunshine, bathed in light with nobody to see it. It was hours before The Chinati Foundation opened, and I was wandering around the museum’s grounds—taking in what Roberta Smith called, in her obituary of Judd, “permanent installations of contemporary art that are among the largest and most beautiful in the world.” I had the whole thing to myself, until I heard a rustling. It was Sir Nicholas Serota, the former director of the Tate who was knighted for his services in 1999. Like me, he was scurrying around, totally in awe. He had arrived in far West Texas from London the day before.

It was fitting enough to see Sir Nick in Marfa at the start of October. For years, Chinati Weekend—the annual food-filled meeting of Chinati artists, board members, and local fans that doubles down on both the conceptual art and the live country music—was held smack-dab in the middle of Frieze London, making it near-impossible for a subset of the art world to attend both. But this year, Chinati director Caitlin Murray swapped the dates, potentially opening the weekend up to those who must get to the art fairs in Europe. The benefit dinner held on the museum’s grounds Saturday night brought out everyone from the musicians whom I saw play at a saloon Thursday night to Charline von Heyl and Christopher Wool, two of the most celebrated Marfa artists. Wool has a show up at the Brite Building in downtown Marfa until 2027, which is worth the trip all by itself.

When I start to describe this art world oasis to neophytes, or even those who know only that there’s something called Prada Marfa, I start by saying this: You know how art experiences that are hyped to enormous heights often don’t live up to expectations? Marfa’s the opposite. Whatever you’ve heard about the place, it’s better in real life—more extreme, more intense, more wacky, more beautiful.

The details of the Marfa phenomenon have been spilled in these pages, but I’ll give you just a quick overview. Donald Judd first saw the area while passing through as a GI. As he began making art and his sculptural ambitions grew bigger, he needed more space than a five-story dwelling in SoHo. After a long search through Mexico, he found the old Army barracks in the middle of a West Texas ranching town called Marfa.

Judd eventually bought building after building, swapping the area’s cow-poke economy for an art-based one. At one point, he employed as many as 60 people in town. He built up The Chinati Foundation as a way to permanently install work by himself and his closest artist cohorts. And he initiated a raucous annual weekend to feast with locals and visitors alike. It’s been going on for nearly four decades.

This weekend was the last one when anyone will get to see the massive installation in the artillery sheds. After Chinati Weekend, those two buildings will undergo a much-needed yearslong renovation that will fix just enough to make it seem like they didn’t do anything at all. But there’s plenty more to see even while the work is underway. Richard Long just opened a new exhibition, an elegant poem in stone. There’s building after building of an astounding Dan Flavin installation, which the artist agreed to sign off on when he was on his deathbed—years after he stopped speaking to Judd.

Chinati has Roni Horn, John Wesley, Carl Andre, and Claes Oldenburg. There’s a full building-size permanent installation of work by John Chamberlain, our man in Shelter Island. Marfa is also home to the Judd Foundation, which maintains a spectacular shrine of buildings spread through the center of town. One called The Block is Judd’s original compound, featuring the artist’s banger of a library. Some of the converted hangars contain the rarest early Judd works, eureka moments when his sculptures first came off the wall. There’s Judd’s man cave, with a kitchen stocked with a full Dean & DeLuca spice rack. He had epicurean tastes, and was loyal to his old SoHo cheesemongers.

There are permanent installations dotting the town too. As you drive in from Alpine, 30 miles east, you’ll see Matt Johnson’s Sleeping Figure. There’s Haroon Mirza’s Stone Circle, commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, another venerable local institution. Also via Ballroom comes the most famous Marfa monument of them all: Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa, which may look one-note in photos—but in person is actually a fascinating fake that deliberately looks nothing like the Prada store it supposedly resembles in every far-lens photo, heightening the absurdity of its installation in the desert outside of town.

There was plenty of programming just for the weekend. The talks program, all taking place at the Crowley Theater downtown, featured a fascinating lecture by Long, who sat onstage mostly wordlessly as he clicked through slides on a projector. (Apparently he sometimes also does this while playing Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris songs.) I moderated a panel with Chinati artist in residence Will Boone and Ursula editor Randy Kennedy, who together cowrote an extremely Texas play called Red Gap. They arranged for a recorded version to blast out of Marfa Public Radio, a station with a reach bigger than the state of South Carolina.