While rooting around in the archives, found this flyer from the Thunderbird Lounge, featuring photos of the old Thunderbird and Capri motels here in Marfa, Texas. Flyer circa 2004? 2005? Original photos circa the ’60s? ’70s? The motor inns have long since transformed into the Thunderbird Hotel and the Capri Lounge, used for weddings (our own Melissa McDonnell Luján had her reception there) and our concerts (Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Tinariwen, At the Drive-In, among others).

Photo by clovenhoovedgangster

Photo by Ginger Griffice

Photo by Felix de Voss

Photo by Vero Snow

Photo by whammygirl

Photo by Lesley Brown

Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

We’re excited to announce that Ballroom Marfa’s spring 2013 exhibition, Rashid Johnson’s New Growth will be traveling to Museum of Contemporary Art Denver this February. The solo exhibition will feature works by Johnson, including the film Samuel in Space and the Shea Butter Irrigation System, both of which were commissioned by Ballroom and produced during Johnson’s stay in Marfa.

Johnson begins the exhibition with the question “What would happen if Sun Ra, George Washington Carver and Robert Smithson started a community together in the desert?” and proceeds to construct that imagined escape using “personally and historically loaded material” such as shea butter and black soap, as well as LP covers and books “in an attempt to blur the lines separating past, present and future.”

Rashid Johnson: New Growth opens on February 21, 2014 at MCA Denver and continues until June 15, 2014.

Every day, she tried to clean the black rubber pellets, the “turf bugs,” out of the abrasions and burns she suffered as a goalkeeper on turfCalgary Courts Centre, golden doors, in Calgary, on October 14, 2014.

While he ran into quite a few bad breaks downhill lie in thick rough on 11, up against the lip of a bunker on 11, near railroad ties on 16 Spieth said his ball striking was the biggest culprit.
Although she’s been training to box off and on for several years, this will be Denny’s first bout.

Distraught parents thronged the city’s Lady Reading Hospital in the wake of the attack, weeping uncontrollably as children’s bodies arrived, their school uniforms drenched in blood.

Shubailat views this as treason to the Arab cause, and last week, he had some more strong words to say about the king.

In 2009, Green Mountain Energy Donated a Solar Array to Ballroom Marfa, making Ballroom the first place in West Texas to receive such an installation from the company. Since then, our solar panels have helped us reduce our Carbon footprint and promote cleaner energy, which is why we were so excited when the Green Mountain Sun Club stopped by the gallery back in November on their way to another Solar Array dedication ceremony at the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute in Fort Davis.

Here are some of the images from their travels around Marfa and the surrounding area:

To read more about the Sun Club’s adventures through Texas be sure to check out their blog.

All images courtesy of Caitlin Conran at Green Mountain Energy.

Thank you to APIECE APART for featuring Quiet Earth in their recent Newsletter. For those of you who don’t know, APIECE APART is a line of beautifully well-tailored, “elevated basics” which were originally inspired by a trip to West Texas. The designers, Laura Cramer and Starr Hout, were so taken with the “austere and beautiful” landscape that they wanted to create clothing using those same ideals.

Their most recent collection “creates a space where Scandinavia and Japan meet” and even though it strays geographically from the Texas desert, the clothes remain as beautiful as ever.

A source there told TMZ: “He’s not horrible but he certainly can’t keep up with the bestI summarized that she had to eat dinner but she only had one spoon left.
Everything he did was groundbreaking.

“I’m proud of what these women are doing.
42 billion over the 15 year contract life.
With Mickey out of action with a shoulder injury, the 6 foot 10 Martin burned Arkansas for 27 points, 8 rebounds and a hugely timely blocked shot that helped set the Tigers up for a last possession that ended with a Keith Hornsby 3 pointer in an 81 78 victory.

Aaaaand another three and out for Wilson and the Seahawks.

Judge Marylynne Beaton agreed to impose the sentence that was jointly recommended by Crown and defence lawyers, handing down a 15 month conditional sentence.

Vanish is the sequel to Firelight, and both books are really more about the relationships of the central character, Jacinda, than anything else.

On Wednesday, October 23, at the Long Center in Austin, Graham Reynolds gave an intimate preview of his Marfa Triptych and, judging by these photos, it was a fantastic experience. But take heart if you missed out! Reynolds will soon be premiering the full Part One of the Triptych entitled The Country and Western Big Band Suite on November 16 in Marfa. For additional information and to buy tickets, visit the event page.

Snapshot from the Quiet Earth installation in New York City, featuring two of our former interns working on a Maya Lin piece. Ballroom 4 LYFE!

James Evans
Prada Marfa, 2005
Digital photograph
40 x 50 inches (unframed)
Limited edition available from Ballroom Marfa

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Prada Marfa: An Explainer

What is Prada Marfa?

Prada Marfa is a site-specific, permanent land art project by artists Elmgreen & Dragset constructed in 2005. Modeled after a Prada boutique, the inaccessible interior of the structure includes luxury goods from Prada’s fall collection from that year. The door does not open, ensuring that the sculpture will never function as a place of commerce. Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa co-produced the project.

Prada Marfa is an artwork initiated by ourselves and realized in a collaboration with the not-for-profit cultural organizations Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa in 2005. It was not a work commissioned by the fashion brand Prada nor had the fashion brand any involvement in the creation of this work. They kindly gave us the permission to use their logo after we asked them, due to the founder Miuccia Prada’s personal interest in contemporary art, and she donated shoes and bags, which have never been renewed but stay the same – as a historic display – inside the sculpture. The right definition of advertisement must be based on criteria more accurate than just including any sign which contains a logo. It is advertisement only when a company either commissions someone to make such a sign, pays for its execution or makes a sign themselves in order to promote the company’s products. And this is not the case here since Prada Marfa never had any commercial link to the fashion brand Prada, unlike the Playboy bunny which went up this summer initiated by Playboy itself.

Prada Marfa is firmly positioned within a contemporary understanding of site specific art, but also draws strongly on pop art and land art – two art forms which were conceived and thrived especially in the USA from the 1960’s and onwards. Many artists, from Andy Warhol with his famous Campbell soup cans to Andreas Gursky with his grand photographic documentation of retail spaces have appropriated and dealt with the visual language of commercial brands. In an increasingly commercialized world, we see the independent artistic treatment of all visual signs and signifiers as crucial to a better and wider understanding of our day-to-day surroundings, including the influence of corporations.

It comes as a big surprise for us that the Texas Department of Transportation now after eight years may declare this well-known artwork to be illegal and we think it would be a shame for the local community if it disappeared after being there for so long since the work clearly is one of the strong points for the cultural tourism, which is such an important financial factor in this region. However, we are very happy to experience the fantastic support from both art professionals internationally, locals and others, who have even created a Facebook page named “Save Prada Marfa” that after just a short while has received almost 4000 likes and daily receives plenty of new posts, stories and images from people who once visited this site.

— Elmgreen & Dragset

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Within our 13 years of producing and presenting important public art, few works have been as eagerly embraced than Prada Marfa by Elmgreen & Dragset. With full integrity, the artists refused for us to ask any corporation, especially Prada, for monetary donations to support the making of this project. It took us over a year of intense fundraising from local and international private patrons to realize this authentic and pure permanent artwork. The family of the late Walter Alton “Slim” Brown, even generously contributed to the project by lending their land. Great public art empowers people and gives them alternate ways to understand the times that we live in; Prada Marfa is a civic gift that has become one of the great worldwide pop icons.

– Yvonne Force Villareal & Doreen Remen
Co-founders
Art Production Fund

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Prada Marfa is a living sculpture, an installation that has taken on a life of its own. In the eight years since its creation, Elmgreen & Dragset’s work has become part of the cultural and physical landscape of Far West Texas. At the same time it has entered into international art history discourse. It’s part of what people think of when they think of Marfa, either as art lovers on a pilgrimage, or as surprised passersby.

It’s also a non-profit project — supported entirely by funds from foundations and individuals — and the antithesis of commercialism. Prada Marfa is an embodiment of the Ballroom Marfa mission to combine innovation and accessibility without compromising on either front. We are encouraging engagement with art, and Prada Marfa is an important precursor to other public art projects in Marfa and Far West Texas.

– Fairfax Dorn
Co-founder and Artistic Director
Ballroom Marfa

Where is Prada Marfa?

Scenes from the Comic Future installation. Aaron Curry in the courtyard!

Ballroom alumnus Rashid Johnson — see our archive of photos from, New Growth his 2013 solo exhibition — has a new site-specific work on display in Chicago at moniquemeloche, entitled Remembering D.B. Cooper.

From moniquemeloche.com

Rashid Johnson’s Remembering D.B. Cooper transforms the 25 foot “on the wall” space into one of his iconic shelf works. The “on the wall” work will showcase a mix of Johnson’s signature materials– plants, black wax, books, albums, and shea butter — to explore the notion of escapism, an issue that continues to permeate his multi-dimensional practice. In Remembering D.B. Cooper, Johnson explores the personal as opposed to the political reasons for the famous, unknown highjacker of a Northwest flight in 1971- a media epithet known today as D.B. Cooper; today, the true identity of D.B. Cooper, who parachuted from the flight holding 200,000 worth of ransom money, remains unknown. Since his 2008 solo exhibition at moniquemeloche titled “The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center,” Johnson has carved out a space for a black secret society (the Boule) to study, meet, work, get their leisure on – and yes escape, and the lore of D.B. Cooper is yet another historical avenue for Johnson to mine.

Remembering D.B Cooper will be on display from now until January 4, 2014.