Marfa

I’ll say the obvious thing first: Marfa is a long way from anywhere. From El Paso it’s two and a half hours east on US-90 through the sort of landscape that makes you recalibrate your definition of empty. From San Antonio it’s four hours west through progressively flatter country until the Chinati Mountains appear like a surprise at the end of a sentence. The drive is part of the experience, which is what people who’ve made it tend to say, and which is genuinely true.

What you find in Marfa is a small town — a real one, with a water tower and a courthouse and a population of ranchers and Border Patrol agents and high school kids — that Donald Judd selected in 1971 to permanently install his large-scale metal and concrete work. The art world followed. A certain kind of traveler followed the art world. The espresso improved dramatically.

The Chinati Foundation and the Permanence of Space

Judd’s great project was the conviction that art should occupy permanent space rather than travel from museum to museum, losing context with each move. The Chinati Foundation is the result: 340 acres of converted military buildings housing permanent installations by Judd, Dan Flavin, and a rotating cast of artists, all designed to be experienced in the specific light of the Trans-Pecos desert.

The Judd concrete works sit in open fields — 100 large aluminum boxes arranged inside two artillery sheds, and 15 concrete sculptures outdoors, each one identical in outer dimension but with different interior configurations. The morning light slides through the shed windows and lands differently on each box. You walk slowly. There isn’t anything else to do, and the slowness turns out to be the point.

Reservations for the guided tours are required and worth making weeks in advance.

The Marfa Lights and the Desert Night

West of town on US-90, a viewing platform faces south toward the Chinati Mountains. On certain nights, lights appear in the distance — moving, splitting, disappearing. The scientific explanation involves atmospheric refraction of car headlights on Highway 67 and distant ranch lights. The folklore explanation predates cars by a century, which suggests either something more interesting is happening or that desert darkness produces optical phenomena that get reinterpreted generation by generation.

I drove out on a clear, moonless November night and waited for an hour. Lights appeared. They moved. I still don’t know what they were, and I find I don’t particularly need to resolve the question.

The Town Itself

The courthouse square has a hardware store, a feed supply operation, a restaurant run out of a converted gas station, and a coffee shop that was clearly not here fifteen years ago and makes excellent flat whites. The Presidio County Courthouse is a pink castle of the West Texas plains, built in 1886, that absolutely nobody who arrives expecting austere minimalism expects to see.

Lia spent an afternoon at an independent bookstore near the tracks that stocks art criticism next to paperback westerns next to seed catalogs. This is Marfa’s particular variety of contrast: the rarefied and the ranching exist within the same few blocks without either one winning.

Prada Marfa and the Vanity of Context

Forty-one miles northwest of Marfa on US-90, a luxury goods boutique stands alone in empty desert, unstaffed, selling nothing. The Prada handbags and shoes inside are real; the building is a permanent artwork by Elmgreen and Dragset. I photographed it from the highway shoulder along with five other cars’ worth of people who’d all made the same detour.

When to go: October through May. Summer brings triple-digit heat that makes outdoor exploration difficult and makes the gallery spaces sweltering. The Chinati Foundation Weekend in October draws crowds and is festive if you book accommodation many months in advance.