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. 

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 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.

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.

Hyperobjects was a group exhibition co-organized by philosopher and Rice University professor Timothy Morton and Ballroom Director & Curator Laura Copelin, that engaged ideas from Morton’s theory to confront the overwhelming scale of the current ecological crisis. 

In his 2013 book, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, Morton defines hyperobjects as entities that are huge—global warming, plastic in the ocean, nuclear waste—and seemingly incomprehensible. Morton argues that hyperobjects create an ecological awareness far beyond normal human comprehension. To understand a hyperobject, we must transform the way we see and experience the universe. In line with this idea, the exhibition sought to create encounters with artworks and non-art objects that de-centered and expanded the scale of human perception.

Via aesthetics, direct sensory experience, speculative explorations, and fluctuations in scale, the artists in Hyperobjects reflected various facets of this monumental theory. The exhibition featured installations and new commissions from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Megan May Daalder, Tara Donovan, Nance Klehm, Postcommodity, Emilija Škarnulyte, and Sissel Marie Tonn with Jonathan Reus, as well as objects and loans from David Brooks, the Center for Big Bend Studies, the Chihuahuan Desert Mining Heritage Exhibit, Earthworks, Rafa Esparza, Raviv Ganchrow, Paul Johnson, Candice Lin, the Long Now Foundation, Iván Navarro, the Sul Ross Herbarium, the Rio Grande Research Center, Oscar Santillán, and The University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory. 

Tara Donovan realized a site-specific iteration of Untitled (Plastic Cups), a work where she applies sculptural process to the fundamental properties of an object, in this case a plastic cup, at a scale that transforms the cup into something else entirely. Emilija Škarnulyte’s immersive video installation displayed neutrino detectors and nuclear submarines from the perspective of an anthropologist from the distant future. Megan May Daalder showed her Mirrorbox, a wearable double helmet invented by the artist to reflect and combine the facial features of participants, breaking down perceived boundaries between self and other.

Sissel Marie Tonn installed a new configuration of her Intimate Earthquake Archive, allowing visitors to wear vests that transmit seismic data from man-made earthquakes caused by gas drilling. Nance Klehm dug massive holes in Ballroom’s courtyard: burrowing, creating heaps, analyzing soil, cataloging detritus, and giving visitors an opportunity to be physically immersed in earth.

The artist collective Postcommodity considered the US/Mexico border with a sound installation that dramatized the government’s co-opting of myth, language, and voice to entrap migrants moving across the landscape. Dedicated to understanding human interactions with the land’s surface in the USA, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) researched and mapped phenomena across the West Texas landscape and added these new sites to their encyclopedic online archive.

Copelin and Morton also included objects sourced from the botanical, geological, and astronomical fields local to Marfa and the Trans-Pecos, loaned by academic partners at the University of Texas at Austin and multiple departments at Sul Ross State University including: the Center for Big Bend Studies, the Rio Grande Research Center, and the Sul Ross Herbarium. Distributed among these specimens and samples were artworks and objects from David Brooks, Earthworks, Rafa Esparza, Raviv Ganchrow, Paul Johnson, Candice Lin, the Long Now Foundation, Iván Navarro, and Oscar Santillán.

Ballroom Marfa collaborated with local, regional, and national research organizations on a slate of supplementary programs that responded to the exhibition and connected participants to the singular ecology of the Trans-Pecos. Project partners included the Borderlands Research Institute, Rice University’s Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences and The Nature Conservancy, among others.

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

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 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 Marfa presented Tierra. Sangre. Oro., an exhibition envisioned by artist Rafa Esparza. The project included new installation, performance, and sculptural work from Esparza alongside collaborations and contributions from artists Carmen Argote, Nao Bustamante, Beatriz Cortez, Timo Fahler, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Star Montana.

Esparza’s work manifests primarily through performance and sculpture, in a territory where the two mediums combine and hybridize. The artist uses adobe brick-building as a process-centered site for personal, cultural, ecological, and political investigation.

In residence in Marfa from June through August 2017, Esparza produced new work and conceived of a site-specific installation particular to the landscape and cultural context of the Big Bend region and northern Mexico where adobe building is prevalent.

For the exhibition, Esparza transformed Ballroom’s architecture using the adobe bricks that are central to his work. While making these interventions, the artist explored, in his words, “the visibility of Brown people in Marfa.” Esparza worked with his father, who taught the artist how to make adobe, as well as with people from his community, Marfa Independent School District high school students, and local adobe craftsmen to produce bricks and install the project.

Esparza’s adobe architecture provided the ground for presentations by the artists he invited to join him in Marfa as he “expanded the idea of a Brown laboratory.” New and existing work was presented amidst structural additions to Ballroom’s facade, galleries, and courtyard, creating spaces for the artist’s “laboratories for dialoguing, thinking, working and making together with my peers.”

In his practice Esparza addresses and excavates the history of colonialism; labor and economic value scales; queer culture and masculinity; as well as personal and familial legacy. He sets traditional materials, inherited processes, and ephemeral choreographies up against institutional structures and the historical narratives of Western sculpture, land art, and performance. The exhibition was a continuation of Ballroom Marfa’s mission to commission internationally-relevant artworks and performances that respond to and engage with our community and environment.

Tierra. Sangre. Oro. was organized by Ballroom Marfa’s curator and interim director, Laura Copelin.