In 2009, Sarah Trigg, a visual artist, embarked on an investigation within the United States, interviewing more than 200 artists in their studios. She met with a wide range of practitioners — from painters to performance artists — of various locations, backgrounds, and career stages to create a behind-the-scenes survey of artmaking today. One of her subjects was Rashid Johnson, whose solo show New Growth was at Ballroom in 2013. An excerpt from their conversation:

Another act that has become part of the ritual of pouring the heated material [to create Johnson’s sculptures] is listening to Eric Dolphy’s “Improvisations and Tukras,” from the album Other Aspects (also the title of one of Johnson’s past exhibitions). To get a sense of what Johnson experiences, I played the record while shooting. Despite much effort, Johnson has not found any other music resembling this song’s specific trancelike feel and syncopated rhythm — whether in jazz, traditional African music, or the rest of Dolphy’s work. It’s as if it had arrived from an otherworldly source. “For me,” said Johnson,

Ballroom’s traveling exhibition Rashid Johnson:New Growth opened at the MCA Denver on February 21st. Here are some of the images of the show (which closes on June 15, 2014) by Luke Stettner and courtesy of the museum.

We’re excited to announce that Ballroom Marfa’s spring 2013 exhibition, Rashid Johnson’s New Growth will be traveling to Museum of Contemporary Art Denver this February. The solo exhibition will feature works by Johnson, including the film Samuel in Space and the Shea Butter Irrigation System, both of which were commissioned by Ballroom and produced during Johnson’s stay in Marfa.

Johnson begins the exhibition with the question “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?” and proceeds to construct that imagined escape using “personally and historically loaded material” such as shea butter and black soap, as well as LP covers and books “in an attempt to blur the lines separating past, present and future.”

Rashid Johnson: New Growth opens on February 21, 2014 at MCA Denver and continues until June 15, 2014.

Every day, she tried to clean the black rubber pellets, the “turf bugs,” out of the abrasions and burns she suffered as a goalkeeper on turfCalgary Courts Centre, golden doors, in Calgary, on October 14, 2014.

While he ran into quite a few bad breaks downhill lie in thick rough on 11, up against the lip of a bunker on 11, near railroad ties on 16 Spieth said his ball striking was the biggest culprit.
Although she’s been training to box off and on for several years, this will be Denny’s first bout.

Distraught parents thronged the city’s Lady Reading Hospital in the wake of the attack, weeping uncontrollably as children’s bodies arrived, their school uniforms drenched in blood.

Shubailat views this as treason to the Arab cause, and last week, he had some more strong words to say about the king.

Marfa Public Radio summer campers came in earlier this morning to do some investigative reporting. For your consideration, some photos of the kids in action, including Exhibition & Programs Coordinator Rosa McElheny facing intense questions such as “Do you like cheese?”

Thanks to intern Berry Stein for the snapshots!

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song screens at 8pm on 12 June 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.

Note: For this screening, viewers under 17 will require an accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is Melvin Van Peebles third movie, which he wrote, directed, produced, composed music for and starred in. Dedicated to “all the sisters and brothers who had enough of the man,” the film follows a young African American man on his flight from white authority. No studio would agree to fund the film, so Van Peebles financed it independently, shooting over a 19-day period, performing his own stunts and several unsimulated sex scenes. Sweet Sweetback is hailed as the beginning of blaxpoloitation as a genre and Van Peebles refused to submit the film to the all-white MPAA ratings board for approval. His opinion was that they were not a jury of his peers and they’d been approving crippling images of people of color for years, so why let them dictate his cinematic agenda? In the end, the film received an X-rating and Van Peebles made T-shirts that read “Rated X by an all white jury,” and incorporated it into his marketing campaign.

In the book Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto, Van Peebles recounts that the idea for the film materialized during his first soul-searching and auto-erotic trip to the Mojave Desert. Looking out at the at an endless row of electric pylons sandwiched by sky and land, he thought it through:

Ballroom Marfa’s New Growth Film Program concludes this Wednesday, 12 June 2013 with Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

Note: For this screening, viewers under 17 will require an accompanying parent or adult guardian.

All screenings are free and open to the public. Films begin at 8pm at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas.

The New Growth Film program is co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA.

Special thanks to Jennifer Bell, Rob Crowley, Tim Crowley, the Crowley Theater and Josh Siegel.

Poster designed by Rob Chabebe of EyeBodega

Descendants of Abraham Hill and Mary Ann Taylor

1But he joined a franchise that wants to lose, isn’t concerned about the present and has taken patience with the plan to an extreme.

Welker talked like a man who knows this could be his last season with the Broncos.

“These are good people, putting their names out over there at Marc’s horse farm for a good cause,” Pyle said.
Simone is going to be a brand beyond how she plays because of the beautiful, earthy, organic style she exudes.

“We have been aggressively contributing, for the sake of peace and to improve the welfare of the people of the Mideast,” Suga said.
He has done an absolutely tremendous job.

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The Brother from Another Planet screens at 8pm on 5 June 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.

An Introduction to John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet

Last week’s film, Space Is the Place, extolled the virtues of a transcendent science fiction aimed at elevating the black population beyond its earthbound social state to the forgotten and immortal path beyond the stars through music. This week’s film, The Brother from Another Planet, inverts Sun Ra’s Afro-futurist and escapist rhetoric, offering a parabolic albeit comedic exploration of life in Harlem in 1984.

Written, directed and edited by independent filmmaker John Sayles, The Brother from Another Planet stars Joe Morton as an escaped slave from outer space, who resembles a black human being everywhere except in his feet. He lands in the ocean off of Ellis Island and blankly makes his way to Harlem where he must quickly learn about an abstract monetary system, class struggle and racial divide without using language, as he cannot speak. Sayles’ choice to make him mute turns the brother into a sort of mirror for society and leads to nuanced satire on immigration and assimilation.

Space Is the Place screens at 8pm on 29 May 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.

Like Shards From Some Vanished Civilization: An Introduction to Space Is the Place

In the 1970s, Sun Ra wasn’t yet recognized as the eccentric genius that he is understood as today. He’d been leading bands for almost three decades, placing ecstatic chanting alongside percolating synthesizer pieces, using improvisational percussion and cosmic expansions of big band styles to create a voluminous if obscure repertoire that placed classic jazz and swing in an extraterrestrial timeline. This destabilized polyglot sound was too conspicuously wacky to fit in with the jazz establishment or its free jazz fringes, and though he’d already graced the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969, his music seemed as equally confusing for the Anglo psychedelic music scene.

His canonization as one of the pioneers of Afrofuturism would have to wait until later in his career, though of course his work now looks right at home next to similar explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, and would help set the stage for Funkadelic’s Afro-cosmic psychedelia, MC5’s liberation rock, Sonic Youth’s deep noise grooves and the Boredoms’ melted drum ensembles.

One place where Sun Ra did find a home was as an artist-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley, where he delivered a series of lectures in 1971 under the heading “The Black Man in the Cosmos, Hyperstition and Fast-Forward Theory.” The course’s now legendary syllabus included the King James Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, work from 19th century occultist Madame Blavatsky, poetry from Henry Dumas, as well as texts about the pagan roots of the Catholic Church, Egyptology and African American folklore.

Someone in the Berkeley AV department had the foresight to record one of these lectures — archived at ubu.com — wherein Sun Ra holds forth in such a way as to indicate that he’s both serious about his cosmological thinking, while at the same time deliberately provoking laughter from the gathered students as he tsk-task-tsks his chalk across the blackboard.

Click here for more info on these free screenings.

Marfalogical Exploration — a group “travelling Marfa to learn how to be successful as professional artists” — stopped by Ballroom back in March to take some snapshots of New Growth, and to chat with Rosa and Erin …

“Upon arrival in Marfa at 12:30 PM, we went straight to Ballroom Marfa to see Rashid Johnson’s show, entitled New Growth. Rosa McElheny, the Exhibitions & Programs Coordinator and Erin Kimmel, the Associate Curator at Ballroom were kind enough to to meet with us.

We were really inspired by our meeting with Rosa because she was recently in the same position that we are in now, since she completed her undergraduate degree in 2011. We chatted about reasons for attending graduate school and finding residencies- she recommended searching residencyunlimited.org.

Rosa also answered questions that I had about how they organized Ballroom’s Marfa Dialogues program. I was curious about how they recruited Michael Pollan (one of my heros) and Rebecca Solnit, among others in Marfa. Hamilton Fish, published of the Washington Spectator, co-presented Marfa Dialogues. The upcoming program this fall will be held in NYC.”