As part of the 2013 Marfa Dialogues program in New York City, Ballroom Marfa presented the exhibition Quiet Earth at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Project Space. Curated by Fairfax Dorn, the exhibition engaged current environmental issues, particularly climate change, and included environmentally-engaged artwork from the 1970s to the present. Featured artists included Amy Balkin, Larry Bamburg, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Maya Lin, Trevor Paglen, and Robert Rauschenberg. 

Marfa Dialogues was conceived in 2010 by Ballroom and the Public Concern Foundation with the aim of bringing together artists, scientists, writers, and critical thinkers to consider a range of social issues, from immigration to the environmental crisis. Since its conception in Marfa in 2010, the program has traveled to the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, to Houston as part of Fotofest, and to New York with the Rauschenberg Foundation. 

Quiet Earth takes its inspiration in part from the 1985 New Zealand post-apocalyptic film of the same name, and serves as an abstract documentation of the ways that humans have responded to the ecological crises of climate change with scientifically informed aesthetic practices. Quiet Earth is about an awareness of volume: That which we create, that which we consume, and that which may, in turn, consume us.

At the Rauschenberg Foundation In New York, Ballroom presented Agnes Denes’ Pyramids of Conscience – a large-scale work that was commissioned from the artist in 2005 for the Ballroom exhibition Treading Water. The Pyramids of Conscience were recently included in a major retrospective of Denes’ work at The Shed. Click here for more information. 

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