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 Marfa presented a screening of Through the Repellent Fence: A Land Art Film, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Sam Wainwright Douglas, artist Raven Chacon, and producer David Harstein.

Through the Repellent Fence: A Land Art Film follows art collective Postcommodity as they strive to construct Repellent Fence, a two-mile long outdoor artwork that straddled the U.S.-Mexico border. Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist, three Native American artists who “put land art in a tribal context.” Aided by the communities on both sides of the border in 2015, the artists installed a series of 28 inflatable spheres emblazoned with an insignia known as the “open eye” that has existed in Indigenous cultures from South America to Canada for thousands of years. The spheres were evenly spaced apart and extended north and south of the border a mile in each direction. 

The film provides an intimate glimpse into the arduous process behind creating an ambitious artwork that gives voice to the shared history and enduring culture of Indigenous societies that have made the region their home for thousands of years before a border ever divided it. Interwoven with this thread are lush scenes using stunning cinematography to absorb viewers into striking land art environments that have preceded Postcommodity’s work. Scenes with other artists and intellectuals working in the land art realm provide context and insight as well. These include scenes with Chris Taylor of Texas Tech University’s Land Arts of the American West program, writer Lucy Lippard and Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. 

This event was free and open to the public.

Ballroom Marfa hosted Maria Minerva in the courtyard on Thursday, July 6, 2017. Her performance was preceded by a “sunset tent” set by W. Creeves, and the evening featured visual accompaniment by VJ Mellow Arms. Wienertown, the latest contender on the Marfa culinary scene, served hot dogs.

This event was free and open to the public.

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

For this year’s DJ Camp, DJ Bigface (aka Javier Arredondo) returned to the Big Bend to offer essential guidance in real-live party-rocking skills. He was joined by two members of the Chulita Vinyl Club, an all-girl, all-vinyl club for self-identifying women of color.  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 is a core component of the camp, Bigface and Chulita Vinyl Club also presented DJing as an art form with a rich culture and history, with portions of each class covering the history of the DJ and basic music theory.

The Capri, Ballroom Marfa, and Carolyn Pfeiffer presented a screening of the documentary Tower, followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Keith Maitland and Sarah Wilson.

On what seemed like a typical summer day, August 1, 1966, a sniper rode the elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower and opened fire, holding the campus hostage for 96 minutes. When the gunshots were finally silenced, the toll included 16 dead, three dozen wounded, and a shaken nation left trying to understand. Using a unique blend of historical archival footage, interviews and rotoscope animation, Tower reveals the action-packed, untold stories of the witnesses, heroes, and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.

Tower unfolds as a moment-by-moment re-telling of the events of the day, highlighting the fear, confusion, and visceral realities of the shooting rampage. After the gunfire subsides, the story shifts to examine the immediate aftermath for these individuals and for society. Finally, Tower steps out of the shadow of history to reveal the subjects as they are in the present day, exploring the legacy of the shooting through the eyes of the survivors of a story they’ll never forget, but in some cases had not talked about for decades.

This event was free and open to the public.

Screening

Poet Eileen Myles joined forces with Ballroom’s Laura Copelin to present Dirty Gay Movie Night at the 2017 season of Marfa Myths music festival. The evening’s double-feature included two hot and heavy classics of LGBTQIA cinema: Bijou (1972) and Community Action Center (2010). The night began with a poem from Eileen and intermission offered a stretch by local yoga teacher Rae Anne Hample and acapella singing from Marfa-based artists Natalie Melendez and Tim Johnson.

Community Action Center is “a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art.” A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s 69-minute “womyn-centric” video work offers new perspectives on sexual aesthetics, gendered bodies, the meaning of porn and of sex itself.

Wakefield Poole’s Bijou is a trippy classic of American avant-garde cinema and one of the most psychedelic examples of ‘70s gay erotica. Shot on 16mm film, the story follows a construction worker as he explores sexual desire and erotic fantasy at an underground club. “It swerves from a near-documentary, realist mode suddenly into a kind of Russian constructivist passage, to an action car chase, a little grainy Warhol and falling we find ourselves in a Frank Wedekind play,” Myles writes of the film. “Sex is a such a rabbit hole in this film and we get treated to such a phantasmagoria of groping and grouping and kaleidoscopic rendering of sex.”

Both films feature graphic sexual content, and the screenings were strictly adults-only. Age restrictions aside, this was an inclusive evening of boundary-pushing film, poetry and community.

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.

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.

Arturo Bandini, a collaborative project/gallery by artists Michael Dopp and Isaac Resnikoff, hosted four shows within two exhibitions: Vapegoat Rising, Dengue Fever, Sim City, and Grey Goo Gardens, over a year-long installation in the Ballroom Marfa courtyard. These micro-exhibitions played off of and with the themes in their hosting projects After Effect and This is Presence.

During the run of After Effect, which was about transcendent abstraction and landscape, Bandini concocted Vapegoat Rising, which they described as a “percolation of fog and rock” and featured work by Josh Callaghan, Kathryn Garcia, Mark Hagen, Rick Hager, Yanyan Huang, Whitney Hubbs, Sofia Londono, and Barak Zemer. Mid-way through After Effect they installed Dengue Fever, a show that functioned as “a sort of Henri Rousseau delirium, a jungle of feeling, and a landscape turned inwards” with work by Kelly Akashi, Marten Elder, John Finneran, S Gernsbacher, Drew Heitzler, Sarah Manuwal, Calvin Marcus, and Roni Shneior.

Then, alongside the Institute for New Feeling’s technological themes in This is Presence, Bandini’s Sim City featured Edgar Bryan, Jason Roberts Dobrin, Michael Dopp, Liz Glynn, Kate Hall, Julian Hoeber, Nevine Mahmoud, and Mungo Thomson. Half-way through This is Presence, Bandini staged Grey Goo Gardens with work from Ed Fornieles, Sonja Gerdes, Joel Holmberg, Dwyer Kilcollin, Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen, Anna Mayer, Thomas Mcdonell, and Isaac Resnikoff.

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