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 Marfa invites you to join us for a free premiere of MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange on Sunday, September 4 at the Marfa Visitor Center. 

MXTX is a live performance, album and open-source audio sample library crossing physical and social boundaries through collaborative exchange. The project involves more than 40 DJ-producers and composers from both sides of the Rio Grande. A collective of the contributing musicians will travel to Marfa to take the stage for the West Texas Premiere of the project as part of the 35th annual Marfa Lights Festival.

The multifaceted and dynamic project is a collaboration of numerous Texas and Mexico-based artists including:

• Golden Hornet, an Austin-based non-profit led by Graham Reynolds
• Orión García, founder of the Latinx DJ/producer/artist collective, Peligrosa
• Coka Treviño, art entrepreneur from Monterrey, Mexico and founder of The Projecto
• Felipe Pérez Santiago, highly-acclaimed Mexico City composer, sound artist and current artist in residence at California’s SETI Institute
• Ramón Amezcua “Bostich” of the groundbreaking Nortec Collective, based in Tijuana
• Rubén Albarrán, renowned vocalist and activist from Mexico City, lead singer of the legendary Cafe Tacvba
• Gabriela Ortiz, Latin Grammy nominated composer and recipient of Mexico’s National Prize for Arts & Literature

MXTX began with the creation of a sample library commissioned from twenty composers and twenty DJ-producers based in Mexico and Texas. These forty artists created a palette of sound designed to represent each of their perspectives. The DJ-producers provided beats, drops, and more, while the composers created melodic, rhythmic, and chordal fragments to be recorded as segments and loops. All of these sounds formed the initial foundation of the MXTX library. A core group of six composers and six DJ-producers, commissioned with balanced geographical representation, used this library to create twelve songs. Created for a mixed chamber ensemble and a DJ, the twelve works will be presented live, with premieres in Marfa, Mexico City, and Austin.

The MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange album was released through Six Degrees Records in 2022 and consists of thirteen songs that demonstrate the immense beauty and power of music to overcome divides. Presented as part of the Marfa Lights Festival, the show at the Marfa Visitor Center will be the second live performance of MXTX. Attendance is free and open to the public. 

Marfa Myths was an annual music festival and multidisciplinary cultural program founded in 2014 by nonprofit contemporary arts foundation Ballroom Marfa and Brooklyn-based music label Mexican Summer. In 2015, The festival expanded from one night to three days and initiated a multi-disciplinary program that featured a sound installation, film screening, and recording residency. With Marfa Myths, the two organizations bring together a diversity of emerging and established artists and musicians to work creatively and collaboratively across music, film, and visual arts contexts. The festival is inherently embedded in the landscape of Far West Texas, and engages with Marfa’s cultural history and present-day community.

MEN performed at the opening reception for Tierra. Sangre. Oro. MEN is a Brooklyn-based band and art/performance collective led by Le Tigre’s JD Samson and Michael O’Neill. MEN believe in the radical potential of dance music and its power to demand liberties through invention and play. 

This was the group’s first performance in several years and included new and iconic music and performance as well as new tracks from each artist’s solo projects. 

Ballroom nominated Serpent Rain by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman for the 2017 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). 

Serpent Rain screened at Marfa’s Crowley Theater along with 12 videos from around the world. The international program was looped into a day of drop-in screenings. This was followed by the feature presentation of Serpent Rain, with a conversation with Ferreira da Silva and Neuman.

The AFI 2017 weekend continued with The Water Body, a symposium organized by Ferreira da Silva and Neuman as an expansion of Serpent Rain and a connector to their next project, Deep Implicancy. The Water Body brought together different perspectives, disciplines, and backgrounds to engage in a conversation about water, locally and globally. Participants included Timothy Morton, author of Hyperobjects and co-curator of the Spring 2018 Ballroom exhibition of the same name; Rafa Esparza, the artist behind Ballroom’s Tierra. Sangre. Oro. exhibition; Yolanda Blue Horse, co-founder of the Society of Native Nations; ecological systems designer, consultant, teacher, and permacultural grower Nance Klehm; and Coyne Gibson of the Big Bend Conservation Alliance. The symposium took place in Marfa at The Lumberyard’s Adobe Room.

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. 

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.

The Marfa Triptych is three portraits of West Texas as envisioned by Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds.

The multimedia, genre-hopping trilogy of performances is inspired by Reynolds’ interest in the intermingled populations of the Texas-Mexico border regions, from ejido to ranch to the visual arts community. The three performances will take place annually, starting in late 2013.

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 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.