In anticipation of International Dawn Chorus Day, the worldwide celebration of nature’s greatest avian symphony, Ballroom Marfa is presenting Birdscapes Radio. This freeform program will center on Frye’s ever-evolving collaborative, sonic exploration into the world of birds. Listeners can expect to hear down-tempo dawn chorus, historical recordings, rare sounds, and seabird colonies hosted by Rob Frye and Sarah Melendez, with guests Edbrass Brasil, Cristian Pinto, Martin Frye, Satya Gummuluri and more. The show will also include excerpts from “Experience the Birds,” the first episode of Maui Nui Seabirds: Mauka to Makai, and Rob’s performative lecture “Hearing Hidden Melodies.”

Birdscapes was originally realized as a video collaboration between Chilean artist Martin Kaulen and Frye, who met while touring with their respective bands Watch Out! and Bitchin Bajas in 2014. Years later, Kaulen coined the term “birdscape” while describing a video he made in which bird’s flight paths are traced, yielding an inexhaustible source of tracks and lines. Frye provided the musical accompaniment “In the Air Like Clouds’’ for the video, and while visiting Kaulen in Paris in 2018, the two hosted a “Birdscapes Sound Happening” at Chez Adel. They mixed Frye’s process of slowing down bird song and flute with Kaulen’s technique of using piezo transducers to amplify these sounds through resonant physical objects, such as the tables, chairs, windows, and a piano.

Birdscapes Radio will be streamed on Ballroom Marfa’s website on May 1st to encourage people to listen to the world of birdsong with a musician’s ear.

This project was organized by Ballroom Marfa Programs Director Sarah Melendez.

Please note: visitors are invited for outdoor screenings of Chang’s film (12 min, looped), projected onto Ballroom’s exterior at sundown (8:30pm – 10pm), Wednesday through Sunday, April 9–25. Masks and social distancing are required. 

Ballroom Marfa selected Patty Chang’s Invocation for a Wandering Lake: Parts 1 & 2 (2016) for the 2021 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). The work calls for contemplation of human and non-human lives, the natural environment, and destructive geopolitical forces, as we witness the artist in ritual acts of care and mourning.

The lifeless body of a whale floats off the coast of Newfoundland’s Fogo Islands, a former fishing hub. The artist Patty Chang is seen meditatively washing the deceased animal. With similar attention, she scrubs the shell of an abandoned ship in the desert of Muynak, Uzbekistan, a defunct seaport on the receded Aral Sea. These repetitive acts seem almost absurd and unnecessary, as these entities could never return to life. Nevertheless, she continues to perform rituals of care, perhaps as a way to process their fateful ends.

Over the last year, we collectively experienced extreme loss due to the ongoing pandemic. If we are to create new ways of living, perhaps we first need to practice ways of mourning, mending, and contemplating through rituals of care, as the film suggests.

Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery in London, Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation. Every year all participating institutions nominate a moving-image work from an artist living and working in their country. This year, all film nominations are tied together around the theme of care.

On April 6, join curator Daisy Nam and Marfa artist Ester Partegàs in conversation in conjunction with Texas Talks Art.

Texas Talks Art is a multi-institutional initiative intended to both introduce the work of artists across the state of Texas to a wider audience and to foster collaboration between local nonprofit arts organizations. Taking the form of virtual 30-minute lunchtime talks, the series features 50 Texas artists in conversation with 50 Texas curators beginning in January 2021 and continuing throughout the year. Texas Talks Art is built on a belief in the need to work collectively to support the remarkable and diverse community of artists living and working in Texas. The series features an intergenerational roster of artists working across mediums and at differing points in their careers. The program encourages dialogue between art workers and emphasizes the broad range of concerns and questions that animate Texas-based artists. Learn more on the Texas Talks Art website.

Donna Huanca presents a series of new works commissioned by Ballroom Marfa in her exhibition ESPEJO QUEMADA. Huanca creates experiential installations that incorporate paintings, sculptures, video, scent and sound. The profound experiences and memories of Huanca’s first visit to Marfa in 2005 inspired the work in the exhibition. The artworks draw on visual, cultural, and mythological cues informed by feminism, decolonialism and the artist’s personal and familial histories, while simultaneously engaging with the biodiversity, geology, and dark skies of Far West Texas. The sky was particularly striking for Huanca–animated with cosmic and extraterrestrial forces while also revealing the natural rhythms of the sun and moon.

ESPEJO QUEMADA, Huanca’s first exhibition since the pandemic, uses mirrors as formal and metaphorical devices to respond to changing conditions. The title, which translates to “burnt mirror” in English and is purposefully feminized in Spanish, alludes to Huanca’s feminist praxis. “Espejo Quemada” suggests reflections of the current moment, portals to the past and future, and catalysts for combustion and change.

The experiences of time, touch and embodiment must all be reconsidered in the shadow of the pandemic, especially as physical contact and proximity to bodies and objects have been restricted. Artworks too are now mostly encountered digitally. By working with an amalgam of color, texture, sound, and scent to enliven the senses, Huanca creates alternative and elongated temporal spaces for contemplation. Through perceptual transformations, we are reminded that the sentient body is a potent source of knowledge and memories.

Viewers experience powerful phenomenological shifts especially through her new work in Ballroom’s courtyard. The artist displays her first outdoor sculpture, which is made of steel and installed atop an adobe bench covered with light-and temperature-sensitive pigment. The work responds to not only the climate in Marfa but also the bodies that sit and engage with the sculpture.

ESPEJO QUEMADA is curated by Daisy Nam, Ballroom Marfa curator.

A digital studio visit and conversation with artist Loie Hollowell and Ballroom director, Laura Copelin, hosted by curator Daisy Nam. Laura and Loie first worked together in 2016 and in this intimate talk connected about motherhood, the body and abstraction in Hollowell’s painting and practice. This conversation coincided with the release of Hollowell’s new limited edition Milk Fountain (2021).

Loie Hollowell was part of After Effect, a group exhibition organized by Copelin at Ballroom in 2016 that featured immersive artworks in painting, sculpture, installation and film and ranged from the cosmic and psychedelic to the sensual and visionary. The exhibition looked at historical paintings and film from the ‘30s and ‘40s alongside works from contemporary artists including Hollowell that addressed notions of the sublime, touching on mortality, landscape, the body, and various modes of abstraction.

Ballroom Marfa is excited to announce the release of Chihuahuan Desert Birdscapes, a new album from musician and birder Rob Frye (Bitchin Bajas, CAVE, Flux Bikes). Inspired by the diverse avian populations of West Texas, Frye’s album features the sounds of his handmade instruments and field recordings intertwined with birdsong selected from Xeno-canto—a citizen science project and repository that encourages volunteers to record, upload, and share birdsong and bird calls. On Chihuahuan Desert Birdscapes, Frye tunes in to the subtle consciousness of the natural world and dives deep into the sonic landscape of the Big Bend. 

Positioned along migratory routes from South America to Canada, the Chihuahuan Desert region of West Texas is home to one of the most diverse bird populations in the Northern Hemisphere. During Frye’s Ballroom residency in May 2020, he identified 74 unique species of birds while exploring the ecoregion. Unfortunately, global bird populations are declining just as humans are beginning to understand their evolutionary sounds and adaptations. 

The album includes six original compositions that highlight bird sounds from the region, including the Lesser Nighthawk, Baird’s Sparrow, Blue-throated Mountaingem, Eastern Meadowlark, among others. Frye uses granular synthesis to produce a series of vignettes supplemented by the rich texture of his flutes, crafted from invasive grasses he collected on the banks of the Rio Grande. The new tracks are a West Texas sound bath of hypnotic woodwinds and synthesizers, familiar from the artist’s work with Bitchin Bajas, intermingled with manipulated trills, warbles, and whistles. It’s as if Frye was hosting a free-form deep listening session with field recording guru Irv Teibel and an ornithologically-focused DJ Screw at the controls. 

Fifty percent of proceeds from Chihuahuan Desert Birdscapes will benefit two West Texas conservation organizations: Borderlands Research Institute for Natural Resource Management and Rio Grande Joint Venture, in support of their work protecting the natural resources of the Chihuahuan Desert through research, education, and outreach.

Additionally, Ballroom offered “Hearing Hidden Melodies,” Frye’s performative lecture on the study and appreciation of avian sound. Taken together, the lecture and music highlight West Texas’ unique climate, geography, and ecology, and synthesizes Frye’s diverse experiences as a musician and biologist at the Institute for Bird Populations in California.

Chihuahuan Desert Birdscapes was developed and recorded in Ballroom Marfa’s gallery amidst Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa’s work in Longilonge and at Marfa Recording Company as part of Frye’s residency at Ballroom.  This project is organized by Ballroom Marfa’s programs director, Sarah Melendez.

This fall Ballroom Marfa presents an outdoor exhibition from October 2, 2020 through February 18, 2021 that features new commissions from eight noted artists. Each artist has created a flag accompanied by a sound-based work that will be on view individually for two weeks, rotating through each artist in the series from October to January. Artists include: Lisa Alvarado, Pia Camil, Jeffrey Gibson, Byron Kim, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Hank Willis Thomas, Naama Tsabar, and Cecilia Vicuña.

The exhibition unFlagging reconsiders flags and their symbolic meaning in our collective consciousness and country, today. Flags communicate beliefs and values in the public landscape. They are inherently performative–they declare, demarcate, and signal. As citizens, we learn to raise them, lower them, fold them, sing to them, and respect them.

The customary use of flags as vehicles to uphold and perform established principles can be challenged. The recent ruling to remove and reexamine Mississippi’s state flag, which displays confederate iconography, for example, reveals not only the power and importance of these symbolic objects, but a shift in consciousness. In this time of social transformation, we invite artists to rethink the immutability and nature of flags. How is meaning constructed, produced, and perpetuated? Can we invent new ways to make symbols and meanings?

Animated by the wind, rain, and light of West Texas, these artists’ flags reflect change and challenge constancy. Visual elements of design, color, and shape are all considered in each flag to create a multiplicity of readings. Additionally, the accompanying sound works are not a singular song sung in allegiance; rather, each artist creates a sonic environment that further activates Ballroom’s courtyard to engage with their particular flag. There is a shared experience around sound, reminding us of the multitude of voices that create space for public discourse. 

This exhibition is organized by Laura Copelin, curator-at-large, Sarah Melendez, programs director, and Daisy Nam, curator.

Ballroom Marfa is excited to present DJ Camp, now in its 10th year, entirely online. The program is free and available to any kid that wants to join!

In this new online iteration of DJ Camp, students will learn music sampling and mixing skills through instructional videos by DJ Bigface and DJ Dada from Austin, Texas. The online resources for DJ Camp this year will include a digital music library and a collaborative playlist of emerging DJ’s from the Chihuahuan Desert and beyond. The classes are designed to engage the imagination of students from all musical backgrounds. While gaining practical experience with music technology. Bigface and Dada will present DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of DJ culture, music collectives, and basic music theory.

In these trying times, music can connect us and keep us together. 

Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery in London, Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation. Every year all participating institutions nominate a moving-image work from an artist living and working in their country.

For AFI 2020, Ballroom Marfa selects Miguel Fernández de Castro’s film Grammar of Gates/Gramática de las puertas. This dynamic visual and aural collage traces the overlapping territories, languages, and conflicts that mark the U.S.-Mexico border within the sovereign Tohono O’odham Nation. The artist weaves together excerpts from the 1970 movie Geronimo Jones, drone and surveillance-like imagery of the landscape, and an affectless recitation of phrases drawn from A Practical Spanish Grammar for Border Patrol Officers.

The rote repetition from the textbook sets a backdrop for the banal and brutal architectures of power situated at the border. Via this military mantra the video registers who navigates the territory, legally and illegally, and the various physical and invisible barriers they might face. The artist uses an observatory set on a sacred mountain and a blocked gate, meant to connect ancestral O’odham lands, as indices of the degradation of stewardship and access. Carefully grafting disparate source material, de Castro illustrates the language of power that defines the edges of a violent dynamic that in turn defines the border.