Texas town morphs into outpost for art
Tiny Marfa, population about 2,400, is gaining attention, residents and renovations because of its unique connection to the art world.
By ANDY GROSS
Published August 28, 2005
MARFA, Texas - For a community that has one stoplight and more than a few buildings blanched and crumbled by the desert sun, Marfa is garnering an outlandish amount of attention from the art world and those who linger on its fringes.
Then again, it has taken about 30 years to rise so far that one survey placed Marfa among the top 10 art towns in the United States.
When Donald Judd, a darling of the New York art world, came to this ranching community on the far western edge of Texas in 1972, he was looking for three things to benefit his imaginative work: space, light and privacy. He got them here, easily.
Marfa is on a 4,830-foot-high plateau surrounded by miles of tan grass punctuated occasionally by scraggy clumps of green shrub. The Texas sky is blue, clear and expansive.
And the town is distinctly off the beaten track. It is still three hours from the nearest airport and about 200 miles from both Midland and El Paso.
While a small stream of artists and art aficionados came to pay homage to Judd, the town remained as it had been. If tourists spent the night, they stayed in bare-bones motels. Until recently, their options for dinner were Subway, Dairy Queen or a local cafe with erratic hours.
Now Marfa is a town on the verge of being discovered - or overrun, depending on your viewpoint.
Big-city folks have begun to buy up the old adobes and renovate them into second (or third) homes. There's now a bookstore, and three restaurants with upscale menus.
The old Paisano hotel, a stately structure built in 1930, is being wired to offer computer-accessibility in the guest rooms. The Thunderbird Motel, which sits right next to the railroad tracks, has remade itself from down-and-out into up-and-coming. An Austin firm is helping renovate a motel across the street.
And there are about a half-dozen art galleries.
Which raises a question being asked not just here but in some cosmopolitan cities on both coasts and in between: Is Marfa going to be the art hot spot of the 21st century?
Perfect gallery: old Army baseThere's little doubt that it was Judd's work that put Marfa on this particular map. Before his arrival, the town was best known as the filming site for Giant, the 1956 hit starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. In 1970 sci-fi thriller The Andromeda Strain was filmed here.
And to many other nonresidents, Marfa is known as the place where flashing lights appear mysteriously on the horizon, perplexing even scientists who have come to study them.
But what may make Marfa a real tourism destination is the growing colony of artists and places displaying their works.
It all began when Judd acquired a former military base, the 340-acre Fort D.A. Russell. Its history traces to use as a biplane base for Army Air Corps reconnaissance flights over the nearby Mexican border. Other military units were added so that by World War II, there was a much larger air base and a POW camp. The need for both ended when the war did and closure of the fort hurt Marfa's economy.
The government sold the surplus base. And Judd began to realize his dream, which required a vast, open space where his large-scale works could exist in perpetuity.
Now owned and run by the Chinati Foundation (named after nearby mountains), Judd's art, along with that of a select number of other artists, forms a contemporary art museum probably unlike any other.
Judd had studied both art and philosophy in college before becoming a painter and later turning to sculpture. He also was interested in architecture. He is typically described as a minimalist, although he disliked that term. But his sculptures are stark, spare and precise.
And here in Marfa are his concrete blocks and huge rooms of aluminum boxes.
Judd's work is elemental and ordered. Appreciating it as art seems instinctive. This doesn't mean you'd want a smaller version of it in your living room. In another environment, the work could appear cold and unfeeling. In a smaller size, it could seem simple and inconsequential.
But when Judd rejected the museums of New York for the wide expanse of the Texas frontier, he found a site whose very ruggedness and remoteness accentuate the clean lines and geometric order of his art.
Outside, 60 concrete boxes, arranged in 15 one-level groupings, stand in front of a row of cottonwood trees that Judd planted. Each box is identical in size, about 5.5 feet long by 2.7 feet wide and 2.7 feet high. But as the moving sunlight and shadow play upon them, patterns emerge, and visitors find themselves fascinated by the seeming mutations of the immutable objects.
Inside two remodeled artillery sheds, boxes of aluminum stand in three ruler-straight rows, 52 in one shed, 48 in the other. Again, the light streaming into the buildings and onto these boxes plays tricks on a viewer's understanding of the normal.
There's more. Judd invited other artists to exhibit with him, and their pieces are included in the guided tours that take more than four hours. Offered by the Chinati Foundation, the tours are divided into two sessions.
The crowd pleaser usually is the work of Dan Flavin. Like Judd, Flavin worked with sharp angles and the vagaries of light. But Flavin's medium was bright fluorescent tubes that glow against white walls.
Ranging through six U-shaped buildings and requiring visitors to make 12 separate entrances, his installations are compelling. "No one stops after seeing just three or four," said the guide on my tour. "They visit all 12."
About 10,000 visitors a year make the pilgrimage to Chinati. The town they find has grown considerably in the past decade. The population in 2000 was 2,121; latest estimate is more than 2,400.
Tim Crowley, a Houston lawyer, and his art-savvy wife, Lynn, were near the front of the parade of new residents. They opened a hip bookstore, with the requisite coffee and wine bar.
Real estate values have skyrocketed, with two-bedroom houses made of adobe - worth between $20,000 and $30,000 five years ago - now selling for three times that. Buyers are from the big cities of Texas but also from New York, California, Florida and even Europe.
"We were so busy (one recent) weekend, I had to call my husband in to help me out," said Linda Jenkins, one of three real estate agents at Marfa Realty. "Folks are coming into town, knocking on doors, asking if the homeowners will sell."
No one knows just what these newcomers will do once they settle in. The big store in town is Dollar General; even Wal-Mart is three hours away.
- Freelance writer Andy Gross lives in Denver.
IF YOU GOGETTING THERE: Marfa is at U.S. 90 and U.S. 67, about 60 miles from the Mexican border. The nearest major airports are about 190 miles northwest, in El Paso, and 195 miles northeast, in Midland/Odessa; there is connecting air service to each from the Tampa Bay area.
WHEN TO GO: Marfa is one of Texas' cooler spots in the summer, but temperatures can still reach 100 degrees. Yet the lack of humidity makes it bearable. In the winter there may be a touch of snow.
ACTIVITIES: The Chinati Foundation 432-729-4362; www.chinati.org) has guided tours - the only way to view Judd's works - beginning at 10 a.m. Admission is $10 general, $5 for seniors. The Judd Foundation has a separate tour of some of his living quarters in the late afternoon, also for $10.
While the bookstore is open daily, many of the galleries are closed Monday and Tuesday.
And you must view the Marfa lights. At the visitor center, 8 miles out of town, we viewed theseries of ghostly flickers on the horizon at about 10 p.m. First one, then another and another ball of light appeared, lingered and vanished. The appearances followed no discernible apparent pattern.
Scientists have failed to explain the lights. The researchers have considered temperature inversions, static electricity, methane gas, automobile lights and other theories, but none holds up to close examination.
Big Bend National Park is about 120 miles to the south and is a major attraction in this part of Texas. Go to www.visitbigbend.com
STAYING THERE: Hotel Paisano toll-free 1-866-729-3669; www.hotelpaisano.com) has a grand lobby befitting its position as a National Historic Landmark. The rooms are clean and comfortable.
The Thunderbird Motel (432-729-4326) has been remodeled to be trendy; nonetheless, some guests may still be troubled by the trains that rumble past several times a night.
Alpine, a slightly larger town, is less than a half-hour drive from Marfa and has a wider selection of motels, including the Ramada Limited 432-837-1100; www.ramada.com)