A selection of works and limited editions by Ballroom artists were on view at Damian in DTLA from February 16–March 12, coinciding with Frieze LA. The exhibition featured works by Carmen Argote, Teresa Baker, Carolina Caycedo & David de Rozas, Beatriz Cortez, rafa esparza & Timo Fahler, EJ Hill, James Evans, Star Montana, Solange Pessoa, Kenneth Tam, and Leo Villareal. 

 

Many of the artworks touch upon identity and diaspora concepts and showcase the breadth of artistic practices that Ballroom supports––several artists were selected for their connection to Los Angeles, where they live and work. 

 

The opening of the exhibition was celebrated at Damian in DTLA on February 16, 2023 and featured a special performance by San Cha and drinks by Casa Dragones. Works are on sale to benefit Ballroom’s programs that are free and open to the public.

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Ballroom joined forces with Summer Shake Up for DJ Camp 2022, offered by Marfa ISD in collaboration with several community partner organizations. The 2022 DJ Camp was a vinyl-only workshop led by members of the Chulita Vinyl Club ATX for Marfa students in grades five through eight.

The workshop was designed to engage the imagination of youth from all musical backgrounds. Throughout the week, students  learned and practiced beat-matching, mixing, scratching, and more. While offering practical experience with turntables and vinyl records, The Chulita Vinyl Club ATX also presented DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of DJ culture, music collectives, basic music theory, and an introduction to zine-making. Students were encouraged to use found music and images to create their own narratives, celebrating personal history and cultural exploration. 

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For the exhibition, The Blessings of the Mystery, artists Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas create a new film and series of installations rooted in West Texas. The project crystallizes the artists’ research into the connections and tensions between the cultural, scientific, industrial, and socio-political forces across locations like the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, the Amistad Dam on the Rio Grande, and the Permian Basin oil fields. 

The presentation centers around The Teachings of the Hands, a single-channel film that depicts the region’s complex histories of colonization, migration, and ecological precarity from the perspective of Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. The video-installation combines observational and experimental documentary with oral histories, reenactments, and archival footage. The film’s narrative grows out of the land where both Indigenous and settler knowledge have been historically produced. Weaving together scenes from the present day to 4,000 years in the past, The Teachings of the Hands highlights the environmental memories and cosmologies of these interconnected places across Texas.

The artists’ pull from different materials and sources to expand on the concepts in the film––they create immersive installations of surveying flags and tools, rendered several series of drawings and collages, and included a collection of original watercolors from the 1930s by artists and amateur archaeologists Forrest and Lula Kirkland that depict the ancient rock art of the Lower Pecos. On loan from the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, these rarely seen plein air paintings document the original forms and vibrant colors of murals that were still visible in the 30s, before flooding, erosion, and human interaction damaged or destroyed them.

The Blessings of the Mystery emerges from Caycedo and de Rozas’s multidisciplinary practices, which are centered around environmental justice, encounters between history and memory, and Indigenous rights and cosmologies. For this exhibition and its iterations across Texas, Caycedo and de Rozas investigate the transformation of Somi Se’k* by way of industry, infrastructure, and private property.

*Somi Se’k means the Land of the Sun and is the way the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe refers to the land known as Texas.

The Blessings of the Mystery is organized by Laura Copelin, former Director & Curator.

The exhibition traveled to the Visual Arts Center (VAC) at The University of Texas at Austin in September 2021 and to the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso in January 2022. The VAC presentation was organized by MacKenzie Stevens, Director, and the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts presentation was organized by Kerry Doyle, Director.

🌎 🌏 🌍

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Ballroom presented Music for Earth Day on April 22, 2022. As part of our 2022 exhibition, Kite Symphony, this gathering brought together seven artists to perform in honor of Earth Day. The artists invited listeners to immerse themselves in the sonic landscape of the exhibition, which then further expanded into Ballroom’s courtyard with sunset shows and live-score performances of Star Scores at the Marfa Visitor Center.

The audience joined us in Ballroom’s courtyard with Roberto Carlos Lange, widely known as Helado Negro, who performed a selection of songs that were primarily recorded at Marfa Recording Company during the pandemic. Lange then performed a live rendition of Kite Symphony, Four Variations, originally commissioned by Ballroom and named by ​​Pitchfork as one of the top 16 ambient albums of 2020. The presentation continued with sunset performances from interdisciplinary artist, impovisor, and opera singer Li(sa E.) Harris, and multidisciplinary artist, composer, percussionist & producer Jamire Williams.

The evening continued at the Marfa Visitor Center with Star Scores, a film commissioned by Ballroom. Live scores were performed by noted electronic artists Jace Clayton, Lori Scacco, and experimental washboard percussionist Newman Taylor Baker with new sounds from his Washboard XT project. The film, installed in Ballroom’s north gallery,  was created by Kristi Sword on 16mm film and later digitized, and features handmade animations of stars orbiting, splitting and multiplying through an imaginary celestial space, inspired by the dark skies of West Texas.

On April 22, 2022, we released Kite Symphony, Four Variations on vinyl in a limited edition of 100.

Admission for all events was free.

Ballroom Marfa presents Kite Symphony, a multidisciplinary exhibition by Roberto Carlos Lange and Kristi Sword. The project features a newly commissioned film, outdoor composition and installation, a series of drawings, sculpture, animation, and a special Earth Day performance. Sound is the throughline between these diverse elements of this long-term project. Lange is a musician (widely known as Helado Negro) and Sword is a visual artist, and Kite Symphony is an extension of their collaborative practice where they create work at the intersection of music, performance, and visual art.

Invited by Ballroom in March 2020 for a production trip for Kite Symphony, then a short film with a live score, Lange and Sword found themselves in West Texas at the onset of a global pandemic and mandates to socially isolate. The artists elected to remain in Marfa and with Ballroom’s support, extended their trip into a six-month residency. Their experience was the catalyst for Ballroom Sessions—The Farther Place, a residency program developed to support cross-disciplinary artists and musicians. As their time in Marfa extended Kite Symphony expanded into a full-scale exhibition, including new installation works, a community sound piece, performance, and four new experimental compositions released through Ballroom’s Bandcamp. Pitchfork called this album a “free-flowing collage that doubles as a snapshot of the project’s sprawl” and named it one of the top 20 ambient albums of 2020. The album features contributions from noted local musicians Jeanann Dara and Rob Mazurek, led by Sword’s meditative and meticulous visual scores.

Guided by the wind and inspired by their day-to-day experiences with the local landscape, Lange and Sword centered a practice of listening to produce new work. Their listening took many forms: they utilized meditative practices to tune their bodies into the sonic environment; they employed field recording to capture and amplify ephemeral or barely audible sounds like wings of insects and the wind itself; and they launched an open call to the community to hear the sounds of the town through the ears of locals. Lange recounts, “When you have your headphones on and a microphone pointing out to the expanses surrounding Marfa you’re surprised with the density of the air. It’s like a big blanket wraps your head and you’re invited into another world.” 

The exhibition at Ballroom features an impressionistic film, which explores the imperceptible forces that shape the West Texas landscape. The video documents the artists’ observations and experiments with wind and light interacting with kites, hand-made mylar instruments, found objects, and native plant materials. Lange and Sword turn their gaze upwards in Star Scores, a piece of visual music that reflects on the region’s dark skies through hand-made animations of galaxies orbiting, multiplying, and expanding through an imaginary celestial space. Adjacent are Sword’s ink drawings of rhythmic and repetitive brush marks, revealing a continuous evolution of a landscape in constant motion. Ballroom’s courtyard will be transformed into a listening space where Lange presents a new sonic installation composed of the sounds collected from the community. Taken together, all of these newly commissioned works heighten the audience’s sense of space by attuning us to expansive new sonic geographies, helping us to listen in diverse ways, and reminding us of our presence in a living world.

On Earth Day, April 22, 2022, Ballroom will host a day of performances with Roberto Carlos Lange and several of his musical collaborators. The show will feature live renditions of Star Scores, a performance of Kite Symphony, Four Variations with a live ensemble, and performances by several friends of the artists, with the full lineup to be announced in early 2022.

Kite Symphony is organized by Sarah Melendez, Ballroom Marfa music curator.

Roberto Tejada gives a virtual walkthrough of Donna Huanca: ESPEJO QUEMADA. He shares insights about the exhibition and Huanca’s use of language, materiality and collage. Tejada also offers references that the artworks conjure including pre-colonial cosmologies and figures such as Ana Mendieta and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Join Marcela Guerrero, Jennifer Rubio Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Daisy Nam, Curator at Ballroom Marfa, in conversation on the work of Donna Huanca in this virtual talk. The two will discuss Donna Huanca: ESPEJO QUEMADA, as well as Guerrero’s work on influential recent exhibitions of contemporary art from Latin America, including the exhibitions Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 at the Hammer Museum.

This program is presented in collaboration with ArtTable.

Registration is open now. Tickets are $10 for Ballroom audiences with the code ATxBMFriend. Student tickets are $5 with the code ATxBMStudent.

Extended Gallery Hours

As part of Chinati Weekend’s Made in Marfa celebration, Ballroom Marfa extends gallery hours on Friday, October 8 to experience the current exhibition, DONNA HUANCA: ESPEJO QUEMADA. Refreshments provided in the Courtyard. Advance reservations recommended. Schedule a visit here. For the safety of our extended Marfa community, we ask all visitors to mask and social distance while inside the gallery.

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Ballroom joins forces with Summer Shake Up for DJ Camp 2021, offered by Marfa ISD in collaboration with several community partner organizations. This year’s DJ Camp will be a vinyl-only workshop led by members of the Chulita Vinyl Club ATX for Marfa students in grades five through eight.

The workshop is designed to engage the imagination of youth from all musical backgrounds. Students will be encouraged to use found music and images to create their own narratives, celebrating personal history and cultural exploration. Throughout the week, students will learn and practice beat-matching, mixing, scratching, and more. While offering practical experience with turntables and vinyl records, The Chulita Vinyl Club ATX also presents DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of DJ culture, music collectives, basic music theory, and an introduction to zine-making.

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Join Knowledge of Wounds for a conversation between Kim TallBear & Daniel Browning on October 20 at 7pm CST.

In this keynote conversation, Dr. TallBear will speak with Bundjalung journalist Daniel Browning on her work on critical non-monogamy. TallBear situates her critique of the assumed, settler-imposed norms of dyadic coupledom and marriage within the Indigenous ethics of Right Relationship. In her work, TallBear traces a compelling line between the strategic imposition of colonial familial structures and sexual mores and the seizure and partitioning of land. In critical dialogue with the work of white ecofeminists such as Annie Sprinkle, TallBear proposes an expanded understanding of erotic relationship and intimate committment that includes both human and more-than-human relations. TallBear both references and refutes the existing formulations of Polyamory, troubling the overwhelming whiteness and neoliberal underpinnings of these movements, and instead makes an argument for the practice of non-monogamy and non-hierarchical intimacy as restorations of our relational sovereignty.