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.

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 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.

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.

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. 

Ballroom partnered with Performance Space New York to co-present rafa esparza’s bust: indestructible columns. This two-act, co-commissioned work began in the streets of Washington, D.C., with a public action challenging and reframing antique architectures of American power that support a continued legacy of oppression—considering the symbolism of the Ionic columns supporting various structures within the U.S. capital. The work progressed, across its two parts, from the artist in a place of isolation and confinement to one of community and support. It culminated back at Performance Space New York, where esparza and invited collaborators Patrisse Cullors, Timo Fahler, Raquel Gutiérrez, Sebastian Hernandez, Risa Puleo and Yosimar Reyes to share the theatre space with their communities for an eventful symposium/public dinner conceived by celebrated chef Gerardo Gonzalez. Attendees collectively witnessed readings that took a cue from the invited artists’ and writers’ respective knowledge, ideas, and experience of change.

As an artist who considers himself brown and queer, raised by working-class, immigrant parents, esparza seeks to build connections with nontraditional art audiences in communities with similar histories and origins. With his action, esparza addressed the symbolic multitudes of the neoclassical columns of D.C. government buildings—at once architectural examples of the parallels of colonialism with the outward trajectory of a dominant Eurocentric narrative of art history, as well as literal support systems for the structures that have housed and given an image of dominance to a legacy of white supremacist governance. The White House, whose porticoes are lined with such columns, now houses the 45th president, whose rhetoric has aided in the inhumane violence of separating families, caging children, detaining adults in intolerable conditions, and instigating hate crimes.

As he built a counter-narrative, esparza referred to the collaborators he gathered as “support columns for the communities we work within, building this other system working toward social justice.” He says, “On a very personal level, the progression of this work from action to community dinner symposium is a way of creating a symbolic counter-image to what we’re being bombarded with—traumatizing videos going viral of families being torn apart, people being raided at their jobs, children crying. I’ve seen a lack of counter-narratives, or even information on how to stop that from happening—how to protect each other, how to protect these families. We’re not just leaving it up to the image or symbol itself to function on its own—we’re inviting folks to hear people read from their writing, people doing the actual work of organizing, and have a communal gathering afterward.”

Act II: Dinner Symposium was held on September 23 at Performance Space New York.

Ballroom Marfa presents a free digital screening of João Vargas Penna’s Landscape Film: Roberto Burle Marx on May 16th at 8pm CST through our Ballroom Marfa Film channel on vimeo. The film is a journey through the art and life of the Brazilian landscape architect and painter, Roberto Burle Marx, best known for the iconic black-and-white mosaic promenades that line Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach.

This documentary explores Burle Marx’s passion for native flora, and the many new species he discovered on his research trips. From his investigation, Burle Marx was able to pioneer a new form of tropical landscaping by organizing native plants in accordance with the aesthetic principles of Cubism and abstractionism. Ballroom presents this free screening as a complementary program to our current exhibition Longilonge, with Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa.

Highlights in the film include the Burle Marx Site, Flamengo Park and Moreira Salles Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Tacaruna Farm and Vargem Grande, in addition to Euclides da Cunha Square in Recife, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia, and projects in France and Venezuela.

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.

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.