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 nominated Apariciones / Apparitions by Carolina Caycedo as the film selection for the 2019 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). Organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery, London, AFI is a program that showcases international artists working in film, video and animation.

Caycedo’s Apariciones depicts ghost-like dancers inhabiting the historic Los Angeles landmark, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The brown, black, and queer bodies haunt these iconic and traditional spaces with dance and sensuous movements informed by the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian deity, Oxum, an Orisha (or goddess) representing water and sexual pleasure. The bodies of the dancers, or phantoms, become sources of knowledge, and their gaze holds the viewer accountable, something that is too often missing from history and art; inhabiting historically white spaces in ways that they have never been inhabited before.

Following the opening reception of Ballroom’s fall exhibition, Longilonge, with Solange Pessoa on November 15, UJI will be performing a DJ set with live percussion at Lost Horse Saloon.

Ballroom presented Steve Reich’s 1967 composition Violin Phase, performed throughout the gallery by Jeanann Dara and Ben Russell during the opening reception of Ballroom Marfa’s 2019 fall exhibition, Longilonge, with Solange Pessoa. Violin Phase is a masterpiece of minimalist music, demonstrating Reich’s iconic phasing technique. The music itself is created from interactions between temporal variations of an original melody and the violins themselves. 

Solange Pessoa Longilonge was the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of noted Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa. The show included new commissioned works that responded to the cultural and natural landscape in West Texas, alongside important existing pieces made in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the artist lives and works.

Pessoa’s expressive work draws inspiration from many sources: nature, the Baroque, dreams and the unconscious, Tropicalia, prehistoric cave paintings and carved tools, Land Art, traditional craft, ancestry, Surrealism, and poetry. Five distinct bodies of work converged for the exhibition—displaying touch-points in the artist’s career and creating a connective tissue of imagery, ideas, and relationships between two distant places in North and South America.

For Longilonge, Pessoa recreated a seminal installation originally staged in Brazil in 1994––an immersive sculpture composed of tiers of coffee bags suspended from the ceiling that were filled with fruit, flowers, seeds, bones, earth, and poems. Visitors were invited to rifle through the abundant materials, spilling, adding and co-creating the sculpture, sensing firsthand the living land of Minas and Marfa—the colors, textures, decay and richness.

Pessoa also debuted a new suite of paintings inspired by research trips to Marfa, where she met local botanists and archeologists, and saw Donald Judd’s works in person for the first time. She created new ceramic pieces and installed her iconic soapstone carvings in Ballroom’s outdoor courtyard, where they absorbed the sun, rain and snow. The clay and stone, sourced in Brazil, she shaped to recall varied organic forms: vaginal voids, nipples, phalli, skulls, spirals, ancient fossils. Bronze and feather wall sculptures adorned the hall, invoking the animal body–its death, life and decoration.

Pessoa’s practice is deeply rooted in land, human and natural history. In this focused exhibition she gathered together materials and iconography from distant but similar environments, creating a conversation between shared forms and interwoven cosmogonies.

This exhibition was organized by Ballroom Marfa Director & Curator Laura Copelin.

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 welcomed Mdou Moctar to the Marfa Visitor Center for a free performance on Wednesday, September 18, 2019, in support of his latest album Ilana: The Creator.

Ballroom Marfa presents A Triptych of Films about Migration that consider the scale of human migration; the difficulties faced by migrants and asylum seekers; and the forces behind mass migration. The films include: El Mar La Mar, Island of the Hungry Ghosts, and Capernaum.

Ballroom Marfa presented a free screening of Cassandro, The Exótico! with a special appearance from Cassandro; Q&A hosted by Sauvignon Blanca; and DJ set by Tokyo Bois. The film is a unique and intimate portrait of the eponymous lucha libre star who grew up in Juarez, Mexico. The program celebrated Cassandro’s life as a former NWA World Welterweight and UWA World Lightweight Champion, and one of the world’s first openly gay luchador wrestlers.

Director Marie Losier beautifully captures the moving, at times humorous, and always colorful dualities of this legendary figure. After decades of spinning dives and flying uppercuts in the ring, Cassandro, the star of the gender-bending cross-dressing Mexican wrestlers known as the Exóticos, is now ready to share his journey. Cassandro’s story—of an underdog and a queer icon, simultaneously fragile and mighty—is ever more timely as it unfolds on both sides of the Mexican-American border.

Ballroom released a special edition silkscreen poster, designed by Marcel Alcalá, to raise money for the El Paso Community Foundation’s fund for victims of the shooting in El Paso on August 3rd. 

Cassandro, el Exótico! was free and open to the public. 

Ballroom Marfa and the Marfa Book Company presented a screening of the documentary The River and the Wall, followed by a Q&A with executive producer Nancy Sanders, producer Hillary Pierce, and associate producer Katy Baldack. The film follows five friends on an immersive adventure through the unknown wilds of the Texas borderlands as they travel 1,200 miles from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico on horses, mountain bikes, and canoes.

Conservation filmmaker Ben Masters realized the urgency of documenting the last remaining wilderness in Texas as the threat of new border wall construction looms ahead. Masters recruited NatGeo Explorer Filipe DeAndrade, ornithologist Heather Mackey, river guide Austin Alvarado, and conservationist Jay Kleberg to join him on the two-and-a-half-month journey down 1,200 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. 

They set out to document the borderlands and explored the potential impacts of a wall on the natural environment, but as the wilderness gave way to the more populated and heavily trafficked Lower Rio Grande Valley, they came face-to-face with the human side of the immigration debate and entered uncharted emotional waters.