Marfa: The Town That Became an Art World
Near Marfa, Texas
At an elevation of nearly five thousand feet in the high desert of Presidio County, the small city of Marfa began as a water stop for a railroad and became, against all probability, one of the most discussed addresses in contemporary art.
The town was established in eighteen eighty-three when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed its tracks through this stretch of West Texas scrub. The site needed a water station to keep the engines running across the long arid distances, and the wife of a railroad executive, reportedly reading Jules Verne's novel Michael Strogoff on the journey west, suggested naming the stop after a character in the book: Marfa Strogoff, a peasant woman who appears in a pivotal scene. The name stuck. The town grew slowly as a ranching center and the seat of Presidio County, sitting in the shadow of the Davis Mountains with Mexico about sixty miles to the south.
The first recorded sighting of the Marfa Lights occurred the same year the town was founded. A cowboy named Robert Reed Ellison noticed unexplained glowing orbs on the plain below the Chinati Mountains while driving cattle through the area and initially mistook them for Apache campfires. The lights have been reported consistently since then, and no fully satisfying scientific explanation has been established.
The transformation came in the early nineteen seventies, when the New York minimalist artist Donald Judd drove through Marfa and decided it was where he needed to be. Escaping a New York art world he found increasingly commercial and rushed, Judd began acquiring property here, working with the Dia Art Foundation to create permanent large-scale installations. In nineteen eighty-six he opened the Chinati Foundation on the grounds of a former Army fort, installing a hundred untitled works in mill aluminum inside two converted artillery sheds. The windows he designed flood the buildings with West Texas light that changes the character of the aluminum from hour to hour.
Judd died in nineteen ninety-four, but Marfa had by then become what he intended: a place where serious art exists in serious space, far from the commercial pressures of the gallery world.
