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Marfa is a Land of Mind

Having grown up the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains and having lived for a spell in Bolinas, I've e'er been drawn to weird far-flung places full of funky characters and distinct landscapes; they experience similar home. And then when WRNS Studio began offering an annual scholarship with the mission to "encourage and promote inspiration and critical thinking in blueprint and architecture," I idea — I'g going to Marfa. I was curious near the human activity of art pilgrimage, and I wanted a gustation of Marfa's secret sauce.

Founded in the 1880's as a train-stop in the farthest western edge corner of Texas, Marfa has become a rite of passage for blueprint lovers curious near Donald Judd's escape from New York (he needed space) and the making of this place. I'd wanted to visit since friends returned with tall tales of dancing with cowboys and running through concrete boxes nether the desert heaven.

The mind-clearing route in and out of Marfa: It pretty much looks like this for 200 miles. And there's a lot of runway. Photos by Bruce Damonte.

Roughly paved, ghost-towny and quietly brimming with artists and tourists, Marfa has been "found." A quick cyberspace search will country yous in the archives of Vanity Fair, Dwell, the New York Times and countless blogs that care nigh modernistic architecture and fine art. Nevertheless, it's a massive expedition to get there — with a four hour flight from San Francisco to El Paso, followed by a 3 hr drive through rolling, empty desert, y'all're looking at a solid day of travel on either cease — and once you arrive, information technology kinda feels similar you've landed on another planet. The Chihuahuan desert plays no small part in this other-worldliness. Situated atop a highland plane chosen the Marfa Plateau, the town has an earthy palate of variable browns made of dirt, rocks, and adobe, and blues from the low-slung mountains and the endless sky that makes a curve all effectually y'all. There'due south as well a lot of grassland and cacti. With thin, mostly single-level homes and few visible signs of commerce or humans from the two-lane highway that runs through this one stoplight town, it would be easy to sneeze and miss Marfa. So, in many ways it nevertheless feels super off-radar.

My friends and I arrived late on a Tuesday and went straight to bed. On my first forenoon, I ventured out solo for coffee. Living in a metropolis for the past 20 years, I expected, naively, to find a cappuccino within a ii-minute walk. I crossed the interstate (which sounds dramatic given how few cars laissez passer) and happily plant a hand-painted wooden sign propped on the street that read "coffee," merely which led me to a dirt lot with an abandoned school motorcoach that recalled a horror film I'd seen too young. There were no obvious stores or restaurants, merely houses and a field. My stake skin was starting to tingle. Things were bright and flat. A train rumbled by, making its big steel noise. I wondered quite seriously where I was.

Photos by Bruce Damonte.

My coffee dependence is existent, like I might get a migraine and go fetal in the grit, real, and so I asked a man working on the roof of an adobe business firm what to do. Afterward a few minutes of chitchat (turns out he'd spent a adept chunk of his life in San Francisco'due south North Embankment before moving to Marfa in the late xc's), he pointed me to single story building of indiscriminate use, and smash! it was like I'd stepped through a magical portal to pattern-lover land — physical floor, high ceilings, natural light, beautifully crafted books virtually design and compages, all arranged very neatly. A squeamish man who looks like my dad after besides much tequila (wild white pilus and a grimace that's really friendly) told me I'd find coffee on the other side of the train tracks.

Railroad train whistles and steel grind are the sounds of Marfa, punctuating the desert silence. Being on foot here is most crossing the tracks, which run through the center of town. Did Judd ponder the trains, find their repetition and symmetry, unproblematic form and use? Images summit and bottom, Molly Thomas. Heart: Bruce Damonte.

Disoriented, slightly irritated, I stepped back out into the sun and took a breath. I reminded myself that I was operating under a different set of parameters. I needed to chill and get with the flow. It was in this state of mind that I was joined by my friends who were already in Marfa mode — past this I mean they were unconcerned nearly any kind of calendar. Nosotros constitute the java, simply non before stumbling upon a shop and talking to a woman who permit u.s.a. come across what she said were Judd sketches hanging on the wall of her studio. And this experience seemed to unfold into others. We might be headed for a sandwich and stop upwards talking to a gallery owner for 2 hours, who, realizing how into his shop nosotros were, took u.s. into his home to prove us more than art. It seemed like everything — galleries, restaurants, the Chinati – took identify on human foot, under the hot sunday, meandering by buildings with unclear uses, cutting over dirt that led to diversions of the all-time kind.

That initial mixed-handbag feeling of disorientation, mild discomfort, curiosity and intrigue — experienced on every trip I've always taken, but sharpened by the flat, hot, wide-open landscape — stayed with me throughout the trip. Indeed, it was my first and constant experience of the place. Part of me wanted to dive in, function of me wanted to bail, like every time I've always put pen to newspaper when an idea kickoff strikes and I free-write out of curiosity and angst. It's almost existence open. And being open in Marfa is deeply connected to its canvas-like landscape, terrain at in one case rugged in the foreground and velvet in the distance, inviting you you fill information technology with your own stories, and to take in its mysteries, which brings me to Judd's concrete boxes at the Chinati Foundation.

Judd's 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980-1984 were cast and assembled onsite over a four year period in a field at the Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum which Judd founded. Each unit is two.5 x 2.five x 5 meters, fabricated of concrete slabs that are 25 centimeters thick. Photos by Bruce Damonte.

"The specific intention of Chinati is to preserve and present to the public permanent large-scale installations by a limited number of artists. The emphasis is on works in which fine art and the surrounding mural are inextricably linked." – Chinati Foundation

There was, in Marfa, the metaphorical wander of the loose agenda: the quiet, the lack of distraction, the realness of people not confront-screening. Similar much of Marfa, where circulation is unsanctioned (the desert seems to assert itself over the built environment) and the programming deeply unclear, Judd's concrete boxes in the grasslands running the perimeter of the Chinati pulled united states into their world of play. I'd heard people talk almost the large Texan sky. And the nights were a spectacle; stars haven't twinkled like that since I was a kid staring up at them from a mountain chosen Ladyface. Merely it wasn't until I walked through the concrete boxes that I saw the Marfa sky truly embrace the state in a deadening dance. The large heaven and the magnificent light hit a apartment gilded globe seem to take provided Judd the space he needed to create and define his fine art, and for his art to arts and crafts space.

I of the people I met in Marfa, not an art lover, said he idea the boxes looked like an unfinished building project, similar someone laid foundations and ran out of coin. Strangely and unspeakably in that moment, their foundational simplicity was exactly what I enjoyed; the box, for me, elicits our innate need for shelter. In constructing shelter, we change the landscape, the sky. We can bring them together or tear them apart. Or we can respect, gloat and experience new things in the country and the heaven that could but happen in a specific place — if nosotros're open to it.

Trekking through dirt and grasslands, wandering through the boxes, the art a kind of canvas for my own experience of wonder and confusion, and joy in all of it — this is how it felt to be in Marfa as a whole, where the circulation is mostly unclear and the programming is up to you. Photos by Bruce Damonte.

Read "Fine art Mecca Step 2: Imagine," here.