We began the day late, luxuriously sleeping in. We don’t have to move on to the next locale til tomorrow. After coffee made in my coffee maker, we headed over to the Chinati foundation. It was begun by Donald Judd when he moved to Marfa and found an abandoned army base. He joined forces with Dia Art Foundation to buy the property, his vision to create a new type of space to show art. Some of the army barracks have been renovated. Two large warehouses now hold 100 of his sculptures. Anyway, we found out that access to the exhibition spaces were by tour only. We opted for the shorter one, and I went to look at the concrete sculptures in the field while mom stayed in the car reading her emails.

This is a kilometer long piece called ‘15 untitled works in concrete’

Then we went to find brunch while we waited for the tour to start.

Marfa is not large. But every time I look on my map and follow it to a place, I end up at the wrong door or at the wrong end of the building. It’s confounding. We found a late breakfast after a few false starts. Then returned for our tour.

The first building held 52 sculptures by Judd. Each had the same dimensions 41” x 51” x 72”, and they all were placed in the same orientation. All were fabricated in 1/2” aluminum sheet. But all of the sculptures were different from each other. The interiors of the ‘blocks’ were different, or the sides might be angled, or the top, or the end, or there might be two panels dividing the volume, and so on. We were not allowed to take photos, unfortunately. The building had been renovated to have large windows, garage door sized windows, along the long sides of the building. Daylight illuminated the sculptures, and created further illusions as to how the pieces were constructed. It is pretty dry stuff, but if you’re a fan of Judd, or minimalism, you’ll enjoy it.

We continued to the next building. The interior of this building was configured a little differently, but it had 48 more of these sculptures by Judd. Mom was a sport, as the walking was a little far for her, and the sculptures a bit too dry. But she asked questions and continued to think about it. We then went to another building to look at Zoe Leonard photographs. Unfortunately mom couldn’t see them very well. They were photos of roiling brown water, the Rio Grande, actually. She went back to the car, since the rest of the tour was a lot more walking, and I caught up with the group to see the rest of the photos. There were more about the doings near the river, and people crossing the border. The second gallery was a ‘U’ shaped former barracks, and made a really nice exhibition space.

Then we went to find a couple galleries, and I messed up my directions again, so we found a really nice bar at the St. George hotel and had food and beverages.

In the morning we left the hip, beautiful people and the dusty, cool town and headed North, no, West to go to Santa Fe. I was even turned around leaving town!