With support from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Public Concern Foundation, Marfa Dialogues/NY featured two months of programming including community forums, art exhibitions, musical performances, and panels in New York City to engage a deeper examination of climate change. More than 30 of New York’s leading cultural and academic institutions participated in Marfa Dialogues/NY, hosting a variety of events ranging from an installation on the High Line to a food truck that will provide an unconventional serving of foods vulnerable to climate change.  Ballroom Marfa presented an art exhibition of environmentally-engaged works at the Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space and orchestrated additional events with Marfa Dialogues program partners at that location.

Marfa Dialogues was initiated co-founded in 2010 by Fairfax Dorn, co-founder of Ballroom Marfa, a leading contemporary arts center in Far West Texas, and Hamilton Fish, president of The Public Concern Foundation (PCF), a New York non-profit devoted to the advancement of public education around social and political topics. Marfa Dialogues was originally conceived as a symposium to broaden public exploration of the intersection of art, politics and culture.

Programming partners included:

The Carbon Tax Center; The Center for Social Inclusion; Columbia University’s Earth Institute; Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate & Society; Cooper Union’s Institute for Sustainable Development; Gallery Aferro; High Line Art; IMC Lab & Gallery; Joe’s Pub at Public Theater; Mary Miss/City as a Living Laboratory; Materials for the Art; New School’s Center for New York City Affairs; NRDC; Sculpture Center; Socrates Sculpture Park; Storefront for Art & Architecture; Superhero Clubhouse and Triple Canopy.

Ballroom Marfa presented the New Growth Film Program, a series of films co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. This program was scheduled to include films to accompany Ballroom’s concurrent exhibition New Growth, featuring work by Rashid Johson. All screenings were held at the Crowley Theater, Marfa, Texas. The schedule was as follows:

Wednesday, May 29

John Coney / Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

Read Daniel Chamberlin’s essay “Like Shards From Some Vanished Civilization: An Introduction to Space Is the Place“

Wednesday, June 5

John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet

Read Associate Curator Erin Kimmel’s “An Introduction to The Brother from Another Planet“

Wednesday, June 12

Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

The Marfa Chamber of Commerce hosted the annual Marfa Lights Festival in 2013 where Ballroom Marfa co-presented award-winning Tejano accordionist AJ Castillo.

Three-time award winner AJ Castillo is known for his unique accordion sound and style, his energetic live performances, and his extraordinary custom accordions. Having lent his musical talent to many artists through countless studio recordings and performances, in late 2008 he felt it was time to step to the front of the stage and introduce a fresh new sound that expands the boundaries of accordion music.

With the release of his debut CD, Who I Am, followed by On My Way and The MixTape, which is a power Cumbia CD, the DVD Up Close and Personal and the New Movement, AJ has embarked on a new journey as a well-known accordionist, singer, and performer.

In 2009 AJ kicked off the Tejano Music National Convention in Dallas and in 2010 became a three-time award winner, being named the Tejano Music Awards Best New Male Artist and the Tejano Academy’s Best Accordion Player and Best Emerging Artist.

Ballroom Marfa presented a lecture by Anthony Elms at the Marfa Book Company in which Elms discussed his work as a curator, editor and artist. More specifically he addressed his work in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart, at the ICA in Philadelphia. The exhibition, which featured Genesis P Orrige, Bernadette Corporation, Dexter Sinister, Zoe Leonard, Erin Leland and Frances Stark, among others, presented the work of artists engaged with clothing, adornment, and self-presentation within the context of identity.

Ballroom Marfa’s Lecture Series is an ongoing program for artists, authors and curators to present perspectives on contemporary culture, visual arts, film, music, and performance.

Far West Texas needs DJs! For our fourth annual DJ Camp Ballroom Marfa welcomed DJs Bigface and Faith Gay back to the Big Bend to help save the local party scene from the scourge of the anonymous iPod shuffling. The two veteran DJ mentors will once again be offering essential guidance in real-live party-rocking skills. Class participants received hands-on instruction on operating the wheels of steel, holding it down on the dance floor, and designing flyers to promote all kinds of site-specific party-installations.

This five-day program was a hands-on experience, with students learning directly on DJ equipment and experimenting with mixing songs and sampling music. The classes were designed to engage the imagination of students from all musical backgrounds, and throughout the week our instructors highlighted other aspects of DJ culture, such as dance and visual art. While getting practical experience on the equipment was a core component of the camp, Bigface and Gay also presented DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of the DJ and basic music theory. During the week, students created DJ personas and designed posters for display at the final event.

Ballroom Marfa invited Eleanore Friedberger out to Marfa for a weeklong recording residency in 2012. While she was driving from Austin to Marfa, she mentioned that she was feeling “a little bit miserable.” Her low spirits convinced her that if she was going to record a 7-inch here, it would include “I’ll Never Be Happy Again,” a heartbreaking song about the moment when sadness invades relationships, and how “after perfection, it’s all downhill.”

Upon arrival, Friedberger’s Chinati Foundation tour guide volunteered to take her on a motorcycle ride down Pinto Canyon, a deserted ranch to market road that dead-ends at the Mexican border. Then, while shopping for dinner, the grocery store checker introduced himself as Gory Smelley, who would soon be recording and mixing her session at the Marfa Recording Company. Smelley’s young daughter joined her on stage for a brief standup comedy routine a few nights later during her intimate solo show at the Crowley Theater.

The 7-inch single she recorded at the Marfa Recording Company features a crew of Marfa players — the Cashiola brothers, Chris Hillen and Brian LeBarton — known from local bands like Candles and Hotel Brotherhood. Colt Miller of the Cobra Rock Boot Company accompanies Eleanor with banjo and pedal steel, adding the finishing touches to the session’s classic West Texas sound.

The A-side “I’ll Never Be Happy Again” is a new song that fans might recognize from Eleanor’s live sets during tours supporting 2011’s Last Summer album. It appears here as a sonorous country ballad, well suited to the lonely environs of the high desert grasslands.

For the B-side, Eleanor chose to cover Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas,” a tribute to her father’s record collection. “My dad only listened to classical music,” she remembers, but after taking a Texas Tech job in Lubbock when she was 14, the Flatlanders showed up on his stereo. “For the longest time ‘Dallas’ was the only song I knew that wasn’t one of mine. To get to record it in West Texas was special; I couldn’t think of a better place to do it.”

Eleanor Friedberger’s new 7-inch, “I’ll Never Be Happy Again” b/w “Dallas,” was published as a limited edition of 500 and is currently available in the online store.

Sound Speed Marker by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler was comprised of three video installations and related photographs, covering a span of five years of work which explore film’s relationship to place and the traces that movie making leaves behind. The exhibition included the premiere of Giant (2014), a work commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. The exhibition was on view at Ballroom until August 10, 2014 and was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Sound Speed Marker traveled to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in December 2014 and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston in May 2015.

Notable works from the exhibition include:

Grand Paris Texas (2009) considers the physical and social space of a dead movie theater, a forgotten song and the inhabitants of a small town. The Grand Theater, an abandoned, pigeon-filled movie theater in downtown Paris, serves as the protagonist in a narrative that explores Paris as a meta-location constructed through celluloid and soundtrack. Grand Paris Texas connects three seminal movies of the Southwest: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984), Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies (1983), and King Baggot’s classic silent film, Tumbleweeds (1925).

In Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011), Hubbard/Birchler explore the site of a mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert near the town of Sierra Blanca. The project generates several narrative strands that interweave memory and forgetting. Movie Mountain (Méliès) features a script-writing cowboy as well as local residents whose relatives performed in an original silent picture filmed at the mountain. 

Giant (2014) interweaves signs of life and vistas of a decaying movie set built outside of Marfa: the Reata mansion from the 1956 Warner Bros. film, Giant starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. After filming was completed the three-sided facade was left behind in the landscape. Hubbard/Birchler explore the skeletal remains of the set as seasons change, day turns to night and parts of the structure swing and fall off. Scenes of a film crew recording the current conditions are juxtaposed with a Warner Bros. office in 1955, where a secretary types up the location contract for the motion picture that has yet to be created.

Ballroom Marfa’s nomination for the 2013 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI) was The Drawing Lesson, a video by New York-based artist Alix Pearlstein that provokes uneasy questions about hidden power structures and the performative nature of our lives. 

Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery, London, AFI is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation. Each of the eighteen international venues that participate in AFI nominate an artist who lives and works in their country. The artist’s work is then exhibited at all other participating venues around the world. 

For the exhibition Ballroom transformed the center gallery into an interactive screening room to view the selections from all participating venues. Additional films by Pearlstein – Security and Light – were screened in Ballroom’s north gallery and courtyard.

The artist’s films often feature groups of actors in minimalist settings moving according to sets of directions carefully constructed by the artist. Throughout each film the perceptual movement of the camera opens psychological spaces that reveal power structures both illusory and real. The films demonstrate an intertwining of the physical and visual signals that characterize our social interactions with other people and the manner in which filmic modes of representation are brought to bear on the history of portraiture and performance.

Ballroom Marfa and Tiger Mountain presented Jeff Mangum. After a period of nearly complete public silence, Jeff returned to perform a few shows across the country and we were honored to present him in Marfa for two sold-out shows.

Jeff Mangum is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his work as the lyricist, vocalist and guitarist of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, as well as being one of the cofounders of The Elephant 6 Recording Company. He is best known for his complex, lyrically dense songwriting, apparent on the critically lauded album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Percussionist Kahil El’Zabar and baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett performed at the opening reception of Rashid Johnson’s New Growth, at Ballroom Marfa.

These two highly sensitive modern music masters came together for a jazz performance of historical significance. The stories they weave with rhythmic complexity and melodic sonority brings listeners on a spiritual journey of musical ecstasy!

The most prominent baritone saxophonist of his generation, Hamiet Bluiett combines a blunt, modestly inflected attack with a fleet, aggressive technique, and a uniform hugeness of sound that extends from his horn’s lowest reaches to far beyond what is usually its highest register. In St. Louis in the 1960s, Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists’ Group (BAG), an artist collective not unlike Chicago’s AACM. And, in 1969, he moved to New York City to join the Charles Mingus Quintet and the Sam Rivers Large Ensemble. In 1976 he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet (along with two other Black Artists’ Group members, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake), which soon became jazz music’s most renowned saxophone quartet. Over the years, Bluiett has also worked with Babatunde Olatunji, Abdullah Ibrahim, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.

Kahil El’Zabar is one of Chicago’s jazz treasures. He joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the early 1970s and became its chairman in 1975. He regularly records for Chicago’s Delmark Records and, during the 1970s, he formed the acclaimed ensembles Ritual Trio and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, both of which remain active today. El’Zabar has performed alongside a myriad of jazz greats such as Cannonball Adderley, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Dizzy Gillespie, but also in the bands of Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.