Free Exposure Soil Tasting – that’s right, soil tasting – with artist, activist, and ecologist Nance Klehm. The program took place at the Capri in Marfa.

Also known as geophagia, the practice of eating earth or soil-like substrates such as clay or chalk has a deep anthropological history and is practiced by various cultures around the world. For this program Klehm collected soil from various locations around Marfa, Presidio, El Paso and the Midwestern tall grass prairie, and guided participants through a multisensory exploration of these samples, including a tasting, where the presence of certain minerals and biological processes cause the different ‘notes’ and flavors.

Klehm was one of the artists in Ballroom’s exhibition, Hyperobjects. For her commissioned, site specific work, she dug holes in Ballroom’s courtyard: burrowing, creating heaps, analyzing soil, cataloging detritus, and giving visitors an opportunity to be physically immersed in earth. After the soil tasting, Klehm shared her experience working in Marfa and her broader engagements with land politics and soil health.

Hyperobjects — Mineral, was part of a three-part Hyperlocal Ecologies program. Ballroom also hosted Animal and Vegetable.

Ballroom hosted a walk through the Davis Mountain Preserve with The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) lead state ecologist Charlotte Reemts. Ponderosa pine populations have drastically decreased in the Davis Mountains, so Reemts and TNC have partnered with Texas A&M University to carry out ‘Operation Ponderosa’ – an initiative to restore and protect the ponderosa pine population in the area.

On the walk, Reemts shared her research on ponderosa pine ecology, restoration, and the effects of climate change on this singular sky island habitat. Participants also had a chance to take home and preserve a piece of the Davis Mountains by creating a sun print from objects they found throughout the hike.

Hyperobjects — Vegetable, was part of a three-part Hyperlocal Ecologies program inspired by the exhibition Hyperobjects. Ballroom also hosted Mineral and Animal. 

Ballroom collaborated with Sul Ross State University’s Borderlands Research Institute (BRI) to host a day of citizen science with a field workshop and discussion on threatened grassland birds at the Dixon Water Foundation’s Mimms Unit.

The workshop included a hands-on catching and banding demonstration, followed by a conversation with regional ornithologists from BRI, Denis Perez, and Mieke Titulaer. Through research and monitoring, the group works to understand environmental factors contributing to the decline of migratory bird populations of the Chihuahuan Desert and the Big Bend Region.

Hyperobjects — Animal, was part of a three-part Hyperlocal Ecologies program inspired by the 2018 exhibition Hyperobjects. Ballroom also hosted Mineral and Vegetable.

Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick returned to Marfa to fill the Ballroom courtyard with their mysterious and cosmic tones at sunset on Tuesday, July 17. The show was free and open to the public. All proceeds from donations and poster sales benefited Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

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

Ballroom joined forces with Summer Shake Up, offered by Marfa ISD in collaboration with other community partner organizations for DJ Camp 2018. The summer camp was free with breakfast, lunch, and transportation to/from MISD provided. Students grades five through eight were invited to participate.

For our eighth annual DJ Camp Ballroom Marfa welcomed DJ Bigface, Si Mon Cecilia Emmett of the Chulita Vinyl Club and Isaac Iskra to the Big Bend to offer essential guidance in real-live party-rocking skills. Students learned 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 getting practical experience on the equipment was a core component of the camp, Bigface, Si Mon and Isaac Iskra also presented DJing and breakdance 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.

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.

San Cha is a Mexican-American singer-songwriter whose work is influenced by a variety of genres including Mexican folk, Catholic Gospel, cumbia, and punk rock. Her performances incorporate these varying musical styles to confront challenges faced by women of color and the LGBTQ and Xicanx communities.

Her album, El Capricho del Diablo, was released in late April 2018 and attendees had the chance to hear these new songs live at Ballroom. The album is an exploration of her own Catholic upbringing and her experiences navigating the power structures that support inequalities of class, race, sexuality, and gender. 

For the performance at Ballroom, San Cha was joined by Ashley Hicks from Experiencia Mosaico (DJ) and the scintillating guitar work of Mamis.

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.

Ballroom Marfa, in collaboration with the Judd Foundation and Marfa Solar System, hosted Freedom Solar Power for a Marfa Solar Social in the Ballroom courtyard. Members of Sun Power and Freedom Solar spoke on the benefits of renewable energy, regional solar rebates, and solar power technology. 

Ballroom’s collaboration with Freedom Solar grew out of stone circle – a large-scale, site-specific public art project by artist Haroon Mirza. Inspired by ancient megaliths, the stone circle was installed semi-permanently at a site accessible to the public just outside of Marfa. The work features black marble boulders that produce patterns of electronic sound and light from energy generated by solar panels. Freedom Solar generously provided in-kind support for Mirza’s installation, helping us realize this ambitious project. The stone circle is a continuation of Ballroom Marfa’s mission to commission internationally-relevant artworks that respond to and engage with our community and environment.