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When people think of West Texas the image that comes to mind is often one of an arid or semi-arid landscape dotted with oil wells. While the region is dry and oil one of it’s major industries, there is more to it than desert and energy, including the natural beauty of the Big Bend area and a thriving art scene in Marfa.

History of the Arts in Marfa

Named by the wife of the president of the Texas and New Orleans Railroad in 1883, for a character in a Russian novel she was reading, Marfa’s connection to the arts started in 1955 with the filming of the academy award winning film “Giant” starring James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. But what put Marfa on the map as a future art destination, was the 1972 move by Donald Judd, a well-established New York artist, to the quiet ranching community. According to the Marfa, Texas Chamber of Commerce, Judd, “was drawn to the area’s open, luminous space of the native landscape as well as its rural agricultural, industrial, and military architectural forms.”

Marfa was originally home to Fort D.A. Russell, a military installation decommissioned after World War II. The Chamber of Commerce says that “Judd was as passionate and discriminating about the context in which his work was installed as about the design of the work itself,” and with the help of the DIA Art Foundation in New York, purchased 340 acres of the former army base in 1979, and renovated it to permanently display and integrate large scale art with the native landscape. According to Nancy Cohen Israel, an art consultant and lecturer in Dallas who leads tours of Marfa, “Judd's monumental work of 100 milled aluminum boxes occupies two former artillery sheds. Former barracks also permanently house the work of other artists in his circle, including John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Carl André, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, among others.”