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.

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Comic Future featured work by artists who employ various approaches to language, satire and representation to explore visions of the future. Drawing from the art historical lineage of cubism, cartoons, figurative painting and gestural abstraction, and appropriating subjects from mythology, advertising, print culture and consumerism, Comic Future addressed the breakdown of the human condition and the absurdities which define the perils of human evolution.

Showcasing works from the 1960s through 2013, the exhibition surveyed political satire and cultural commentary through movements ranging from capitalist realism to contemporary pop art. The works included early drawings by Sigmar Polke, collage by Walead Beshty, painting by Carroll Dunham and Peter Saul, alongside newer works by Dana Schutz, Sue Williams, Michael Williams and Erik Parker and sculpture by Aaron Curry, Liz Craft and Mike Kelley. For the exhibition Ballroom also commissioned a new, site-specific wall installation by artist Arturo Herrera.

This exhibition was curated by Fairfax Dorn.

New York’s Devin Gary & Ross, the visually inclined trio of cartoon animator Devin Flynn, photographer and sign painter Ross Goldstein, and illustrator, designer, and all-around Renaissance weirdo Gary Panter (and art director for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”), performed at the opening of Ballroom’s 2013 exhibition Comic Future, at Ballroom Marfa. They were joined by special guest Kramer – musician, composer, record producer and founder of the New York City record label Shimmy-Disc.

Dallas Collective (Michael Corris, William Binnie, Soraya Abtahi, Jenna Barrois, Ellen Smith, Alexandra Monroe, Dylan Wignall, Rhyanna Odom, Nina Davis, Elainy Lopez, Hannah Tyler, Michael Deleon,and Braeden Bailey, Kelly Kroener, Travis LaMothe, Michael M. Morris, Melissa Tran)

2013 Texas Biennial Commissioned Project
Presented by Ballroom Marfa

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.

William Tyler played with $3:33 at the Highland Annex in Marfa, TX on August 6, 2013.

In the early 1960s a number of Western musicians began turning on to the mesmerizing sound of Indian ragas. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are the most widely-known of these dilettantes, while composers like Terry Riley, Simone Forti and Catherine Christer Hennix brought transcendent drone concepts to the West as disciples of the Hindustani singer and teacher Pandit Pran Nath. Likewise, sitarist Ravi Shankar found a constituency among Western hippies, while Brij Bhushan Kabra started playing traditional ragas on guitar for Indian classical audiences.

We find Henry Flynt — self-described “cognitive nihilist,”— in-between these pop and avant-garde camps. Flynt blended Hindu and hillbilly aesthetics, merging the holy music of India with Western religious music, Southern blues and finger-picking from Appalachia. The result was a new transnational folk music and an evolution of the hypnotic structures of Indian devotional jams.

Nashville-based guitarist William Tyler is a practitioner of such mystical music, and proof of it as a living tradition. Tyler can be heard on records from, Lambchop, The Silver Jews and Charlie Louvin. But it’s on his own albums where he stakes his claim as a member of the traditions outlined above.

His 2013 album, Impossible Truth, exists as part of this lineage but adds dimensions to the sound that are all his own. He attributes the album’s origin to readings about Southern California, its relationship to the apocalypse and ecological disaster and the self-involved social dynamics of the Laurel Canyon scene. He describes the resulting LP as his “’70s singer-songwriter record; it just doesn’t have any words.”

Marfa-based musician Celia Hollander opened for Tyler in her $3:33 guise. Hollander makes electronic compositions that range from meditative pieces for keyboard and treated voice to collaged battle raps from underground YouTube MCs. Her music shares a similar openness to aesthetic cross-breeding, a sound born as much from the ominous heavy-lidded hip-hop of Three Six Mafia as the pastoral digital abstractions of Asa Chang & Junray.

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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.

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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 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

 

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The Reading was an annual program at Ballroom Marfa between 2011 and 2013 which offered a staged reading of a winning script from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ annual Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. The program aimed to bring the screenwriter together with an actual audience at an early point in the creative process and included performances at Marfa’s Crowley Theater, panel discussions with the screenwriter and others involved with the project. Presented as part of Ballroom Marfa’s year-round Film Program, the screenwriter of the winning script was selected from among five Nicholl Fellows by a committee of filmmakers.

Ballroom Marfa’s distinguished Filmmakers’ Selection Committee chose Academy Nicholl Fellow James DiLapo’s script Devils at Play for the 2013 production of The Reading. 

Set in the Soviet Union circa 1937, Devils at Play centers on an officer of the secret police who finds a list of traitors that he believes could be his ticket out of the repressed existence he struggles with day to day. In addition to being selected for The Reading and awarded a coveted Academy Nicholl Fellowship, Devils at Play also made the 2012 Black List of the year’s top 10 unproduced screenplays.

Julia Dyer — director of 2012’s highly acclaimed The Playroom and festival darling Late Bloomers — helmed the staged performance of Devils at Play for The Reading. Chuck Huber played the lead role of Stepan. Award-winning Dallas actor Drew Wall returned to The Reading stage opposite Huber, in the role of Ilich. Veteran film producer Carolyn Pfeiffer and Ballroom Marfa board member Nancy Sanders returned as producers. Devils at Play was performed by actors with scripts in hand, full stage direction, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound.

2013’s esteemed Filmmakers’ Selection Committee was comprised of: 2012 Sundance winner for best director Ava DuVernay; Oscar® & Tony® Award-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden; Hitchcock director Sacha Gervasi; and returning committee chairman, pioneering producer Robert Shapiro.