Snowy Marfa, December 2012. Courtesy of Food Shark.

The Ballroom Marfa gallery will be closed from December 22-January 7. For holiday shopping, any items ordered after December 19th will not ship until after January 4th. For any questions, please email [email protected], and we will respond upon our return. Have a merry holiday, and see you next year!

There is still a bit of water remaining in the ethanol at this point, so it is then dehydrated in a molecular sieve system to remove this last 5%, increasing the alcohol level to 200 proofThe 2009 Pew Global Attitudes survey found that many believed the new American president would act multilaterally, seek international approval before using military force, take a fair approach to the Israeli Palestinian conflict and make progress on climate change. 1 ranked Tigers captured five individual conference championships Sunday at Hearnes Center and for the first time in program history crowned a four time conference champion. After those games and several multi team events, Rutgers had one opening on its schedule and a desire to stay locally with Big Ten travel looming. The Middle East, which is currently dealing with large numbers of low skilled immigrants from south Asia, seems to be a hotbed of racial tension,

LIGHT MOVES | Artist Sam Falls with his dog, Penelope, in the north end of his Glendale, Calif., studio. Photography by Jesse Chehak for WSJ. Magazine.

Artist Sam Falls contributes to a conversation with the Wall Street Journal about L.A.’s steadily growing art scene and the Southland’s laid-back vibes. A solo exhibition from Falls will open at Ballroom Marfa this coming March.

From The Wall Street Journal:

“The pace here is more organic,” says Sam Falls as he walks through his current exhibition at the gallery. His pieces—large negative silhouettes created in part by leaving foliage (ferns, palm fronds) on raw canvas out in the rain—are big, ambitious and all about process. He works on some of the larger-scale projects from several spaces, including a converted knitting factory in Glendale and a parking lot near Pomona. “You can get to the next level of your work in a more fluid way here,” says Falls. “Art needs to be incubative…[People] move to New York to become artists with a capital A. Not here,” says Sam Falls. Sure, there is an art market, and there are openings and power players, but there is a welcoming, communal vibe to it all. “I see making my art as almost a blue-collar job.

Come visit Ballroom Marfa at the first-ever FREDA holiday pop up in NYC this week, December 11th-13th, at The Collective Showroom from 11am-7pm. FREDA will be recreating their Marfa boutique space on a much larger scale with all of the wonderful brands we love from Marfa and beyond. There will be an opening night reception on Thursday, December 11th, from 6pm-9pm hosted by Pamela Love with drinks by Gather Journal and music by Ballroom Marfa!! If you or yours are in the city this week, please drop by and see us.

Take a listen to the DJ soundtrack to our 2014 Benefit Gala,

Photo by David X Prutting/BFAnyc.com

To mark the occasion of Ballroom Marfa’s 2014 NYC Benefit Gala, BlackBook talked with friend of the Ballroom Trey Laird of Laird+Partners. In this interview he shares the beginnings of his involvement in the town’s art infrastructure, and finding inspiration for his own creative endeavors.

From BlackBook:

How are things going for the Ballroom?

It’s amazing. Obviously the famous thing they supported was Prada Marfa–to have something like that in the middle of nowhere get such global attention, it’s really extraordinary. Not only for those artists, just what it says about independent art and being able to realize projects and have them accept people in different ways. I think there are so many thousands and thousands of people who drive by that and have no knowledge of art and don’t know anything about Ballroom or the artists or anything about it–but think about it and interact with art in maybe a way that they’re not even realizing. I think there’s something really amazing about that. Ballroom is one of those places that I think is such a free-spirit in the art world. There aren’t that many of those. There are so many institutions that are big and powerful and have huge budgets and powerful boards–but to have some small, independent things that are really open-minded and experimental, and have freedom, and allow artists to kind of push the limits of what they want to express: that’s the beauty of what Fairfax and Virginia have created. Most artists are super inspired to do something like that in Marfa. It’s just this magic place that. I’ve never met an artist that either hasn’t loved if they’ve been or isn’t dying to go if they haven’t. That’s inspiring; it’s a very inspiring place.

Photos by Jenny Anderson

Ballroom Marfa’s 2014 New York Benefit Gala took place Monday night at Prince George Ballroom, a celebration of our 11 years of bringing world class music and art to the Big Bend. In addition to celebrating our past, the gala helps us to secure essential support for future programs. The event included the conclusion of our benefit auction – hosted by Artsy – along with Graham Reynolds’ performance of the first chapter in his Ballroom Marfa-commissioned Marfa Triptych, The Country & Western Big Band Suite.

Vogue, Style.com, Guest of a Guest and WWD were on hand to document the festivities:

From Vogue:

New Yorkers have seen their fair share of ballrooms, but leave it to a group of Texans to find one that seemingly none of the art world glitterati have ever visited before…[Lauren] Santo Domingo, Maria Baibakova, and Sofia Coppola were all on hand to fete Ballroom and the pioneering spirit of the town of Marfa, as were Dustin Yellin, Rashid Johnson, and Luke Wilson, a native Texan. Peter Copping made one of his first New York appearances since taking the reins at Oscar de la Renta, and Naomi Campbell snuck in after appetizers to join Allison Sarofim’s table. View photos here.

From Style:

Everything’s bigger in Texas—even when it’s a gala affair across the country. The nonprofit art space Ballroom Marfa shipped up to New York City for a benefit bash at another ballroom (the Prince George on 27th Street) last night. On the guest list: Naomi Campbell, Martha Stewart, Sofia Coppola, and more. View slideshow here.

From Guest of a Guest:

The Ballroom Marfa Benefit Gala took place at Prince George Ballroom last night with guests including Rainer Judd, Naomi Campbell, Texas-bred Luke Wilson, Dustin Yellin, Martha Stewart, and more. The event, which celebrated the 11th anniversary of the contemporary arts space, stayed true to the spirit of Marfa, Texas. [Be] sure to check out our slideshow.

From WWD:

An artsy fashion crowd trickled in as the cocktail hour lingered, allowing guests like Sofia Coppola, Peter Copping, Dustin Yellin, [and] Rainer Judd… [This] being a dinner for a Texas organization, the menu featured fried chicken and short ribs served with yams, corn bread, collard greens and macaroni and cheese. Grassy landscapes of Marfa washed over a projection screen while the Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds and his 11-piece band gave a commanding performance of the first installment in “The Marfa Triptych: The Country & Western Big Band Suite. See more here.

Jorge Macchi’s (Argentina) film 12 short Songs (2009), Courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery

This video presented by London’s Whitechapel Gallery highlights the 2014 season of works for Artists’ Film International, a collection of artists’ film, video and animation from around the world. Among the artists highlighted is Nicole Miller, who will be featured in Ballroom’s sixth installment of Artist’s Film International. Artist’s Film International is on view November 22-January 11, 2015 at Ballroom Marfa, with an opening reception on November 22 from 6-8pm. Click here for all the details.

The video also includes work from artists Jorge Macchi (Argentina), Angela Su (China), Oded Hirsch (Israel) and Provmyza Group (Russia).

A description of Nicole Miller’s piece from Whitechapel:

Untitled (David) (2012) by Nicole Miller observes a man the artist encountered by chance on the street.
He recounts the events leading to the amputation of his left arm whilst his right limb is reflected in a mirror,

Sam Falls
Untitled (California Palm Rubbing 10), 2014
colored pencil on paper
24 × 18 in
61 × 45.7 cm
Courtesy of the artist; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

As we make the final preparations for our 2014 NYC Benefit Gala on November 10 as the Prince George Ballroom, we’d like to draw your attention to some of the works that are included in the benefit auction. Artsy, the leading resource for art collecting and education, will host the online auction preview. Bidding on lots will launch on November 4, at 12 PM ET and will close on Artsy on November 10 at 3 PM, at which point bids for all lots will be transferred and executed at the event.

Click here to view on Artsy.

For more information, contact Artsy’s Tania Cavallo at 914.484.6409 or [email protected].

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s exhibition, Sound Speed Marker will be closing this Sunday, October 26. Come out and see it if you haven’t already!

Here’s a brief overview of other’s thoughts about the exhibition:

From Art in America:

Hubbard and Birchler’s rigorous anatomy of a monument in eclipse is exceptionally soulful and also sublime. You look at and through it, toward the immense landscape and sky. Interspersed shots of desert plants, rain and wind, and ants swarming a grasshopper carcass underscore that the threadbare movie set is now part of, and dominated by, nature. Made from and about Texas, and shown in Texas, the exhibition was altogether superb.

From Artforum:

“Sound Speed Marker” continues the inquiry that Giant refines in two earlier documentary explorations that likewise explore the ways film’s past-tense fictions permeate real geographies in the present…Well cited at Ballroom, Marfa, just down the road from Donald Judd’s utopia, all three films encourage the viewer to consider the specificity of any locality, even when just passing through.

From Glasstire:

Giant dispenses with spoken language altogether, and the convention of talking-head interviews. There are no “real” people telling their stories. The site of the historical movie is not defined by absence, as in the previous two videos. Instead, the history is concrete and well documented, which seems to grant license to Hubbard and Birchler to push further away from narrative. In this, they achieve fantastic visual pleasure with the landscape scenes in the present.

From an interview in Bomb:

IA All three works in Sound Speed Marker—Movie Mountain, Grand Paris Texas, and Giant—reference Hollywood movies that use Texas as a backdrop, either physically or as a concept. For me, there’s a sense that the Hollywood movies are somehow mining the state’s status as an untamed landscape independent of the rule of law. Watching Giant in particular I came to think of these Hollywood studios as some version of oil prospectors, trying to extract from the setting whatever they could. What’s the relationship between Hollywood and Texas for you?

AB…The works in Sound Speed Marker certainly explore some paradigms of the western. Over the course of developing the component works for Sound Speed Marker, we considered a number of different sites around the country and even a couple of sites in Europe. The three sites we chose to commit to and explore over time were challenging and resonant for us on a number of exciting and unknown levels.

Ballroom Marfa and Tito’s Vodka Cocktail Reception
Friday, October 10 from 6-8pm

Ballroom Marfa invites you to join us in welcoming Executive Director Susan Sutton at a Sound Speed Marker cocktail reception this Chinati Weekend. We’ll be serving beer, wine and Tito’s vodka cocktails in the gallery to go along with the continuing Sound Speed Marker exhibition from Hubbard/Birchler.

Sutton, a regular visitor to Far West Texas, joins us here in Marfa after a four-year tenure at Houston’s Menil Collection. Read more about our new executive director here.

Sound Speed Marker documents sites of forgotten film history in Texas with photography, sculpture and three video installations in the Ballroom Marfa gallery. As Alexander Birchler told Irina Arnaut in a recent interview in Bomb Magazine,

Over the course of developing the component works for Sound Speed Marker, we considered a number of different sites around the country and even a couple of sites in Europe. The three sites we chose to commit to and explore over time were challenging and resonant for us on a number of exciting and unknown levels. They all share the potential of a curiously missed mark – we’re visiting these sites at the wrong time.

Hubbard/Birchler’s Sound Speed Marker will be on view at Ballroom Marfa until October 26. The exhibition will then travel to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in December 2014 and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston in May 2015.