What Chinati Did to Marfa

The road from Alpine runs west across the plateau, and the light changes before the town does. The air dries out and clears, the sky opens, and the grass along the fence lines turns the color of old rope. Cattle stand far off, small and still, as if someone had set them out to measure the distance. Then the courthouse tower comes up over the horizon, catching the sun, and there is Marfa.

The town sits on a high shelf of West Texas, a tidy grid of blocks laid out because the railroad needed a place to stop. The courthouse anchors the square, red-stone and ornate, a tower keeping watch over the whole basin. Around the square the storefronts tell the story at a glance: a feed store, a gallery, a post office, a bar whose sign has not changed in years. The highway runs straight through, and for most of the town's life there was no reason to get out of the car.

The wind is the town's oldest sound. It comes down off the plain, moves the loose signs, rattles the awnings, and keeps going. The altitude thins the air and brings the light in close, so a white wall glows in the late afternoon and the mountains to the south—the Chinatis, low and blue and folded—press against the sky at the end of the world.

For most of its life, Marfa was a county seat and little else. The land around it is among the emptiest in Texas; ranch country runs in every direction, fence gates and windmills and distances measured by the time it takes to cover them. The town got its name, so the story goes, when a railroad official's wife looked out at the empty ground and named the place for a character in a Russian novel she was reading. The cattle business thinned over the decades. Young people finished school and drove away to the cities, and the town did not die so much as loosen—fewer faces on the square, more windows with paper in them.

Then the artist came.

The Man Who Bought the Fort

Donald Judd was a New York artist of exact habits. He made objects of aluminum, steel, and plywood, works that would be ruined by the wrong room. In the early 1970s he came to West Texas looking for more than a gallery could hold: space, distance, and buildings a man could afford to fill with art. He found them at the old Army post on the edge of Marfa, Fort D.A. Russell—barracks, warehouses, a mess hall, long open sheds that had once stored artillery. He bought the fort's buildings one by one, and then he bought buildings in the town itself. Piece by piece, Marfa began to arrange itself around his intentions.

Judd's idea was permanence. He had spent years watching art travel from gallery to gallery, packed in crates, shown for a month, stored away in a warehouse. At Chinati the work would stay. The buildings would be part of the work. The light would be part of the work. He named the foundation for the mountains to the south, and in 1986 it opened its permanent installation to visitors.

The centerpiece fills the two old artillery sheds: one hundred works in mill aluminum, standing in long low rows the length of the buildings. The sheds run as long as airplane hangars, with banks of windows along the walls, and the aluminum sits close to the concrete, taking in everything the day gives it. To stand in the shed at midday is to watch the building do its work. The window frames draw long shadows across the floor; the aluminum returns the light without arguing with it. The rows repeat all the way to the far wall, and the repetition is the point—one thing after another, exact and unhurried. The work does not ask to be admired. It asks to be watched.

Outside, fifteen works in poured concrete stand in a field, massive forms with openings wide enough to walk through. They take the weather the way the land takes the weather—sun, dust, frost, downpour—and they go on standing. The foundation also opened its rooms to other artists Judd respected: Dan Flavin's installations of bare fluorescent tubes, which fill long barracks rooms with nothing but color, and John Chamberlain's sculptures of crushed metal.

Judd died in 1994. The sheds remain, and the desert has not taken them back. The visitors keep coming across the high plains.

The Road Through Town

For years the visitors came in thin numbers, people with dog-eared catalogue pages and a long drive ahead of them. Then the word spread, and Marfa became what no one had planned: a destination.

The town had been one once, briefly. In the mid-1950s the film Giant was shot on the ranches around Marfa, and the cast and crew spent weeks in town. The movie put Marfa's name in lights for a moment, and then the moment passed, and the town settled back into its long shrinking. The art came later, and the art stayed.

The galleries arrived first. Then the hotels. Then the restaurants with prices that belonged to another city. The town gained a second economy. Weekend crowds filled the square with cars from other states, and the art pilgrims walked the length of the sheds in the quiet of their pilgrimage. On the highway toward Valentine, an artwork in the shape of a Prada storefront stood alone in the grass—two artists had built it in 2005 and left it to do its strange work among the cattle. The cars stop. The cameras come out. The road runs empty in both directions.

The Marfa Lights, the old unexplained glow that people have argued about for generations, still draw their faithful to the roadside east of town. On some weekends the town has more spectators than residents.

Not all of it was easy. The year-round population watched the transformation with the patient skepticism of people who had seen boom and bust before. Property values rose; old empty houses found buyers; new names went on the mailboxes. The town's politics thickened. But the change also paid bills. The foundation needed guards and guides and groundskeepers. The hotels needed cooks and housekeepers. The school that had watched its graduates leave one by one began to watch some of them come back. And the ranch families, who held the oldest claim on the land, mostly went on ranching, which is its own answer to fashion.

The Year-Round Town

In February the town returns to itself. The hotel lots empty, the galleries go quiet, and the wind comes down off the plain with nothing to stop it. The people who live in Marfa year-round know one another, which is to say they hold opinions about one another, and about the foundation, and about the whole noisy business of their town being famous.

On a weekday morning the post office is the busiest place in town, and the talk runs to cattle and weather and the price of diesel. The man who runs the feed store has never been inside the museum, or goes every spring when the relatives visit—either way, he knows what it is and what it has done. The old families still gather at the same long tables. The newcomers, artists who arrived for a season and stayed, have learned the town's rhythms: when the crowds come, when the roads clear, when the desert does its best work.

The art does not compete with the town. It lives beside it. The concrete works stand in their field while the ranch country runs up to the fence line. The aluminum works fill and empty with visitors in their seasons: spring grass, the sharpening air of autumn, the long quiet of winter, when the sheds wait.

Something has been settled in Marfa that no one exactly planned. The town did not become a suburb of the art world. It became the place the art world travels to in order to be quiet. And the people who live there—the ones who stayed through the thin years and the ones who came later—hold the town down between its two seasons: the season of the visitors and the season of the wind.

Chinati did not save Marfa. Marfa was never lost. But the foundation gave the town something it had not held in a generation: a reason for the road to stop, and a reason for the young people to stay. The light was there first. The aluminum works still stand in it.

Photos: John Cummings (CC BY-SA 3.0)