Marfa and the Art Migration: Who Gets Pushed Out
Near Marfa, Texas
Donald Judd arrived in Marfa in nineteen seventy-one because the space was cheap. He was a New York art-world figure who had been making large-scale concrete and aluminum works that no Manhattan gallery or museum could properly house. Marfa was a town of roughly two thousand people, most of them Hispanic, most of them economically struggling since the United States Army had closed the base at Fort D.A. Russell. The real estate was affordable in the way that real estate is affordable when an economy has collapsed.
Judd bought property, including the old army base. He installed his works there permanently. In nineteen eighty-six, he formally established the Chinati Foundation, a permanent contemporary art institution that over the following decades drew collectors, critics, and arts tourists from New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo to a small railroad town in far West Texas.
The transformation of Marfa into an international arts destination is the kind of story that gets told, in certain circles, as a triumphant narrative of cultural revitalization. From the perspective of the Hispanic families whose labor built and maintained Marfa, and who had been the primary community there for generations, the story has different textures. Property values in Marfa have risen to levels that make the town inaccessible to the people who built it. A community that was affordable precisely because it had been economically marginalized became, through the arts economy, a desirable place in which the long-term residents could no longer afford to remain.
The Chinati Foundation's concrete and aluminum installations are still here. The question of who the town is for is also still here.
