Twenty years ago, Ballroom Marfa co-founders Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn faced a seemingly impossible challenge. They were told that opening a hub for film, music, and visual arts in the Chihuahuan Desert was a fool’s errand. They not only wanted to establish a contemporary art museum but also commission and curate new works in Marfa, a rural town of about 2,000, with nary a metropolis on the horizon. They’d have better luck stumbling upon an untapped gusher in the Permian Basin’s Big Lake oil field.
“Fairfax and I, of course, dug our heels in the dirt and said, ‘Well, that’s exactly what we’re gonna do,’” Lebermann recalls.
Their bet paid off. Ballroom Marfa helped put the town on the national map as a cultural retreat and furthered the vision of the town’s forefather, minimalist artist Donald Judd. This fall, the museum is celebrating its 20th anniversary as a non-collecting institution with a book from Phaidon Press, Ballroom Marfa: The First Twenty Years, and a gala at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York.
“Working with the artists and the filmmakers and the musicians was so much a part of what was intriguing to us—the humanity of it,” Lebermann says.
Prada Marfa, the prankish storefront installation in the town of Valentine, about 35 minutes northwest, is perhaps Ballroom Marfa’s most famous artwork. But the museum’s 2004 debut group exhibition, Optimo: Manifestations of Optimism in Contemporary Art, featuring Takashi Murakami’s “eyeball” balloons that were later displayed at Rockefeller Center, proved the founders were ambitious.
Lebermann can’t say what the next 20 years of Ballroom Marfa hold, but the museum’s brazen mindset is ready for anything. “What is the next thing that somebody is going to tell us, ‘You can’t do that’?” she says. ballroommarfa.org
Enjoying this article?
