For 2019 DJ Camp Ballroom joined forces with Summer Shake-Up, offered by Marfa ISD in collaboration with other community partner organizations. DJ Camp was free with breakfast, lunch, and transportation to/from MISD provided. Students, grades five through eight, were invited to participate.

Students learned skills directly on DJ equipment and experimented with mixing songs and sampling music. The classes were designed to engage the imagination of students from all musical backgrounds. While gaining practical experience with music technology and DJ equipment wais a core component of the camp, Dada 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 and basic music theory.

Ballroom Marfa and Agave Festival Marfa presented Tlacuilcopa – a workshop and exploration of Nahuatl with artist and activist Fernando Palma Rodríguez at Ballroom Marfa.

Nahuatl is a widely-spoken indigenous language of Mexico and Central America that uses a writing system based on logograms – written characters and images that represent a word or phrase. While our familiar alphabetic writing employs a few dozen symbols, logographic writing make use of hundreds if not thousands of symbols.

Participants in the workshop learned about the structure and application of the Nahuatl writing system and then learned to create their own logograms. Rodríguez also shared his efforts to save this threatened language. Together with his family, the artist operates several NGOs that focus on teaching and preserving the language in Mexico.

Rodríguez’s artwork was on view in Ballroom’s galleries as part of the exhibition Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine.

Marfa Myths is 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. 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.

For more information visit marfamyths.com

Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine was an exhibition that featured new work by three artists: Beatriz Cortez, Candice Lin, and Fernando Palma Rodríguez. The title refers to a facet of each artist’s contribution to the show, which ranged from wax pours to robotic storytellers to provisional shelters and beyond.

The varied installations and objects from these three artists generated a conversation about the animate qualities of land; human and non-human migrations & cross-pollinations; and the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future. Each artist spent time in Marfa and around the Big Bend, and these experiences were reflected in the commissioned works.

New drawings from Candice Lin explored common species around Marfa–cholla, creosote, ocotillo–and were produced after the artist ingested tinctures she made of each of these plants. Lin also created an immersive new installation from her research on the biopolitics of the candelilla plant, that was harvested and utilized on both sides of the nearby US/Mexico border.

Fernando Palma Rodríguez created new ‘mechatronic’ sculptures that speak to intersecting lands, myths and histories in Texas and Mexico through choreographed spatial storytelling. These kinetic works responded to algorithms from nature and to the movements of bodies throughout the gallery.  

A new installation from Beatriz Cortez in Ballroom’s courtyard explored modernity, nomadic architectures, and the oppressive structures of Donald Trump’s family separation policy via geodesic domes constructed from chain link, mylar, folded metal, and scrapped car hoods. Cortez also engineered a new machine titled Infinite Mixture of Things, Past, Present, and Future that used a hypocycloidal gear to mix air and move a small garden of native crops, referencing the generosity of plant respiration and universal exchange of breath.

The exhibition put these three important artists and their distinct bodies of work in conversation about lands, plants, and histories particular to the U.S./Mexico border in West Texas and facilitated the production of a slate of new objects and installations via Ballroom’s commissions–supporting new art, ideas and relationships.

Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine was organized by former Ballroom Director & Curator Laura Copelin.

The Way You Make Me Feel was an exhibition that featured new and existing work from artist and writer Jibade-Khalil Huffman, including First Person Shooter, the video nominated by Ballroom Marfa for the 2018 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). AFI is an international exchange organized by Whitechapel Gallery, London, that showcases emerging artists working in video and animation from across the globe. Huffman’s film was complemented by newly-commissioned sculptural work, paintings, and video from the artist in Ballroom’s galleries. 

First Person Shooter (2016) is a complex visual collage that layers stock digital animation, video shot by the artist, bold text, and multichannel audio. Overlaid onto the imagery, a libretto-like text applies lyricism to collaged episodes that intentionally frustrate conventional narrative expectations. Stock audio and digital animation combine with Huffman’s footage of actors who can’t help but fall asleep mid-sentence. The artist calls into question the labor of consciousness and the anxious ennui of the internet age. The piece continues Huffman’s exploration into the formal qualities of video as a medium, while weaving together themes of anxiety, race, violence, overstimulation and boredom from a fractured palette of source material. 

In addition to embedding First Person Shooter into an installation with multiple new video channels, Huffman realized a large-scale sculpture for Ballroom’s courtyard: a massive light box that uses the sun as light source, illuminating an iconic film still of Grace Jones. He produced a new video and sound work that experimented with the notion of foley (sound effects produced manually for film and added after recording), and also composed a vinyl text poems on the gallery walls, playing with the convention of museum didactics and situating the other AFI videos within the logic of his visual, poetic and critical language.

AFI 2018 was organized by former Ballroom Director & Curator Laura Copelin.

def.sound performed for the opening reception of The Way You Make Me Feel on November 16th at WRONG Marfa. def is a frequent collaborator of Jibade-Khalil Huffman and the concert included a specially selected set to accompany the thematic content of Khalil’s installation.

Ballroom Marfa hosted Tierra. Sangre. Oro. Adobe Workshop, an education program for Marfa Independent School District high school students. This adobe brick-building workshop was led by artist Rafa Esparza, and gave students from our community the opportunity to engage in a creative process steeped in regional history. Esparza’s program opened new channels of expression, encouraged understanding and pride in Borderlands cultural heritage, and further illuminated the traditional practice of adobe brick-making.

Esparza uses the process of building adobe bricks as a tool to investigate culture, labor, ecology, and politics. The use of adobe has a long history in the Texas/Mexico border region where Ballroom is based. The public nature of Esparza’s process – and the community effort that he engages to create the building blocks of his installations – was a unique opportunity to produce new work that bears distinct ties to our region. During the workshops Esparza presented his history with adobe brick building and its significance to the cultural heritage of the Southwest. Esparza also offered an overview of the materials used in the brick building process.

The program also included a day of adobe brickmaking with high school students at MISD. After drying, the bricks were transported to the Ballroom Marfa gallery for installation. Students were invited to install this work, and explore the Tierra. Sangre. Oro exhibition.

To celebrate the reactivation of Ballroom’s latest commission, Haroon Mirza’s stone circle, Ballroom presented a very special program at the Crowley Theater.

First we screened PASSAGE, a short film by artist and co-founder of the CineMarfa film festival, Jennifer Lane, which documents megaliths across the Iberian Peninsula. The screening was followed by a short talk on West Texas petroforms – human-formed shapes made by lining up rocks into patterns on open ground – by William A. Cloud, Director of the Center for Big Bend Studies. This was followed by a conversation between filmmaker, archeologist, Ballroom’s director, and the public. The evening culminated in a full moon activation of the stone circle.

This Botanical Collage Workshop was part of the Judd Foundation’s 2018 Ranch Day, an open house at Casa Perez with guided visits of the Ranch, live music & BBQ, and a talk by Aimee Roberson, Coordinator of the Rio Grande Joint Venture for the American Bird Conservancy

Ballroom hosted a botanical collage workshop at Ranch Day inspired by the exhibition Hyperobjects, which features a selection of herbarium samples on loan from the Sul Ross State University Herbarium.

Together we learned what an herbarium sample is and why they are important to botanists while creating collages from native plant materials. Local botanist & artist Jeff Keeling and artist & plant lover Sandra Harper led this workshop that considered both science and aesthetics. 

Ballroom Marfa presented a free screening of Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light at the McDonald Observatory. The film was complemented by free entry to the evening’s Star Party and a chance to learn more about the McDonald Observatory’s participation in the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Nostalgia for the Light documents the landscape of the Atacama Desert through the lens of Chilean political history and astrophysics. Despite the vast distance, the Atacama is directly connected to our West Texas Chihuahuan Desert via the development of the Giant Magellan Telescope. 

At 10,000 feet above sea level between the Chilean coast and the Andes Mountain Range, the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth with some of the darkest and clearest skies. These conditions, in part shared by the Chihuahuan Desert, attract astronomers from all over the world. Guzmán’s film, set in the Atacama, simultaneously documents astronomers’ quest for distant galaxies and a group of womens’ poignant search for the remains of their relatives disappeared during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.

The screening was paired with an opportunity to learn more about the Giant Magellan Telescope and the complementary science being performed at the Observatory that will impact the deepest levels of discovery science in astronomy.

This event was free and open to the public.