Marfa Dot Net

City offers Casner Building wall for Blackwell mural

Feb
01

(staff photo by JOHN DANIEL GARCIA)
A large mural by El Paso artist Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado commissioned by the The Blackwell School Alliance will be displayed on the eastern wall of the Casner Building

By JOHN DANIEL GARCIA

johndaniel@bigbendnow.com

MARFA – The City of Marfa agreed last Thursday to host a mural by El Paso artist Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado on a prominent wall in the city at the request of the Blackwell School Alliance.

The mural, which will be located on the eastern wall of the Casner Building (City Hall) facing the Stripes convenience store and U.S. 67/90 (San Antonio Avenue), Blackwell School Alliance director Gretel Enck said, will incorporate stories and symbols of the rich history of Marfa to translate the city’s cultural and historical diversity into a work of art.

Enck requested the Casner Building wall due to its prominence in the city.

“When people come into town from Alpine, it’ll be one of the first things they see,” she said.

The mural, she added, will not cover up the old Casner Motor Co. painted sign on the building. The mural has also been approved to stand for at least 10 years.

“Our goal is to unearth the stories and symbols that depict the diverse community and culture found here,” she said, explaining that part of Alvarado’s work it to engage with community members to create a design for his work. “This mural will be a point of community pride. [Alvarado] has an ability to reflect actual stories and symbols from the community, and I love his appreciation for community conversation.”

Alvarado is an accomplished muralist who has created works in his home community of Segundo Barrio in El Paso.

The artist was visited last year by Marfa High School art students on a field trip with Chinati Education Director Michael Roch.

Alvarado also held a workshop for the students in Marfa, where the children created their own works of art in black and white on canvas in which they shared their stories and gathered found images from the city’s landscape.

Some of the paintings, Enck said, are currently on display at the Marfa ISD library.

The mural, Enck said, will be the first of two planned by Alvarado, though the second, smaller mural at Blackwell School Park will need to be approved by the City of Marfa Parks Board.

“There’s a little wall at Blackwell Park where we hope to have an echo image of the main mural to tie it all together,” she said.

Over the next month, the design will be finalized and will go through an approval process through the city, with hopes to complete the murals by spring.

In the meantime, Blackwell School is raising funds for the estimated $15,000 mural with a GoFundMe account.

The school has so far raised $7,000 in foundation grants, as well as $5,000 for a fundraising block party and menudo cook-off that the school is hosting on April 28.

The school also has two additional grant proposals submitted, one of which will target City of Marfa Hotel Occupancy Tax funds.

“I think this, as public art, is a really important addition and counterpoint to the other artwork we have here in Marfa,” Marfa Mayor Ann Marie Nafziger said of the mural. “I think it’s fantastic that the council let them use that side of the building, and we’re all excited that Blackwell is bringing this big mural to Marfa.”

To donate to the project, please visit https://www.gofundme.com/blackwellblockparty.

More information on The Blackwell School Alliance can be found at www.theblackwellschool.org.

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Chinati to host one-day film studies workshop February 10

Jan
25

MARFA – On Saturday, February 10, Chinati will host a one-day film studies workshop led by filmmaker David Fenster and focused on the Western.

Fenster has selected a slate of films that span the genre, from classic to more revisionist and unconventional examples. The workshop will examine the Western’s relationship to American identity and life in Marfa.

Participants will watch films throughout the day and discuss civilization, wilderness and freedom in the context of cinema and our lives.
This free workshop begins at 8:30am and ends around 5:30pm. Enrollment is limited and lunch is provided. Please email apowers@chinati.org or call 432.729.4362 for details.
David Fenster is an independent director, cinematographer, and editor based in Marfa. His work has screened at festivals, art museums and media outlets around the world including Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Times and Tribeca Film Festival.

Fenster’s latest work, Opuntia (2017), is his third feature to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

 

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Blackwell School kicks off mural fund drive

Jan
25

Muralist Cimi Alvarado came to Marfa in November to meet residents and collect stories. He also visited Marfa ISD to see the work of the students who visited his studio last year.

MARFA – The Blackwell School Alliance is crowdfunding a community mural, and invites businesses and individuals to contribute. The mural is the cornerstone event of the Blackwell Block Party scheduled for April 28, 2018—a one-day festival celebrating and commemorating the diverse culture and the rich heritage of Marfa.

El Paso muralist Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado has been selected to create the mural based on his experience working with the residents of Segundo Barrio to tell the neighborhood stories through appealing public art. Mr. Alvarado also worked last year with Marfa ISD high school students as part of a mural project conducted by the Chinati Foundation’s Education Department. Students visited Mr. Alvarado’s studio in El Paso to learn how to express identity through large scale art. The Marfa mural will be created and designed using images, stories, and symbols discovered through community conversations in Marfa.

The Block Party and Mural are part of the Alliance’s mission to serve the Marfa community through culture, history, and education. Longtime Board member and former student Jessi Silva notes, “It’s exciting for the Alliance to bring something new to Marfa, something that both honors our history and inspires the next generation.”

The Blackwell School Alliance has received substantial grants from The Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation and the Kirkpatrick Family Fund toward the creation of the mural. They are now soliciting donations for the remaining funds for the mural, and funds for event logistics and entertainments. In addition, the Alliance is working with the City of Marfa to finalize a location for the mural.

The mural will celebrate the rich culture and heritage that make up the Marfa mosaic, in a way that fosters pride, ownership, and engagement on the part of ALL residents and visitors to Marfa. After the day of the Block Party has passed, the mural endures as a reminder of our shared community and experience.

You can make a donation and learn more at gofundme.com/blackwellblockparty. Or contact Gretel Enck at gretel.enck@zoho.com or 432.295.3359, or Taylor Livingston at tayloranndi@gmail.com or 323.303.1552.

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Semi-permanent Ballroom Marfa installation influenced by Neolithic sites

Jan
25

By JOHN DANIEL GARCIA

johndaniel@bigbendnow.coa

MARFA – Nine large black marble stones, ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 pounds, sit in a field at the edge of Golf Course Road, with eight stones arranged in a circle and one – “the mother stone” – outfitted with solar panels, standing alone.

The semi-permanent Ballroom Marfa installation by British artist Haroon Mirza was conceived around three years ago and showcases Mirza’s use of nontraditional media – in this case light and sound – and his interest in Neolithic structures such as Stonehenge and the Nine Ladies.

“He’s in a really interesting point in his career, where he’s made installations with stones that involve solar power, LEDs, and speakers. He’s never done anything in this scale before, but he dreamed up the installation specifically for the landscape in Marfa,” Ballroom Marfa Executive Director Laura Copelin told the Big Bend Sentinel. “He started to visit these sites and really kind of trying to observe the energy there and thought deeply about why these mysterious monuments existed there. It struck him that he could create a stone circle here in Marfa.”

For his stone circle, Copelin explained, Mirza decided to use black marble stones trucked in from a quarry in Torreon, Mexico, juxtaposing the non-native rocks with the West Texas landscape.

“Because the rocks are so different than the color of the landscape, it seems like they could have landed from outer space,” Copelin laughed. “There’s a sort of extraterrestrial streak throughout the installations. Haroon created a composition that’s composed of both sound and light. They have their own scales that are both visual and audio.”

During a preliminary walkthrough with Ballroom Lead Preparator Matt Grant of the site, the speakers and lights were turned on, though the tonal composition has yet to be completed and a test pattern blaring through the stones.

The final composition, Grant said, will be around 40 minutes long as the LED lights flash different colors while each speaker plays the tones in what the artist calls a “solar symphony”.

The orientation, Grant added, was set in a true north position, with the expectation to align with the Summer Solstice, and a long-term alignment with Aquarius as the during the next cosmic shift in about 20 years.

The stones will be activated every full moon with public access to the site via Golf Course Road.

The stones, Grant said, took about two weeks to be carved and were set up in around two days using large cranes from Midland.

While creating the installation, Copelin added, Mirza and Ballroom Marfa experienced the unintended consequence of adding more solar infrastructure to businesses and residences in Marfa.

While consulting with Austin’s Freedom Solar Energy, who covered half of the costs as an in-kind contribution, the solar firm also contracted with several businesses including the Pizza Foundation, the Capri, and Villis Inde Gallery.

“Marfa has tripled the use of solar in six months after we engaged Freedom,” she said.

Though the installation is expected to open alongside Marfa Myths in April, Ballroom Marfa has begun to get the word out.

“It will really be a thing you’ll have to experience. Photographs and being told about it doesn’t do it justice,” Copelin said. “It’ll be powered by the sun and activated by the moon. It’ll be really special for people who come here at the right celestial moment.”

 

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Photography and verse at Museum of the Big Bend

Jan
11

ALPINE – Photographs of the Continental Divide from Alaska to Chiapas, Mexico, alongside poems by 39 poets from Texas and New Mexico, will be on exhibition at the Museum of the Big Bend, January 13-March 25.

“Echoes of the Cordillera: Attitudes and Latitudes Along the Great Divide” features the photography of Alpine resident Jim Bones, alongside ekphrastic poetry, poems written after reflecting on an objet d’art, co-edited by Lucy Griffith, Comfort, and Sandi Stromberg, Houston. Area poets included in the exhibit are Dr. Nelson Sager, Sul Ross State University Professor Emeritus, English, and Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.

“Echoes of the Cordillera” opens on Saturday, January 13 starting at 5pm, with poetry readings from 6-7pm. The opening reception is free and open to the public

A limited-edition publication featuring all works in the exhibit will be available for purchase in the Museum’s gift shop for $24.95 plus tax. “Echoes of the Cordillera” will be on exhibit until March 25, 2018.

For more information, contact the Museum of the Big Bend, located on the Sul Ross campus, (432) 837-8143 or at www.museumofthebigbend.com.

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Marfa Contemporary says adios with a bang

Jan
11

By JOHN DANIEL GARCIA

johndaniel@bigbendnow.com

MARFA – Marfa Contemporary shuts its doors this Saturday with a final performance by New York-based artist Autumn Knight and special Marfa guests.

According to Marfa Contemporary Guest Director Kate Green, she approached Knight with the possibility of a performance to give the institution a proper sendoff.

“I didn’t just want to turn the key and leave,” Green said. “I invited Autumn and we talked about doing a performance that’s all about closure, that will speak to the history of Marfa Contemporary. Even though it wasn’t around a great deal of time, it did make an impression on many people.”

The performance begins promptly at 6pm Saturday, Green said, with each portion of the building serving as a stage for a different portion of Knight’s performance.

“Autumn is an amazingly captivating performer. She’s one of those magnetic-type people,” she said.

Following the performance, DJ Little Danny will jump on the turntables to end the night right with a dance party, featuring Big Bend Brewing Co. beer and Middle Eastern-inspired food.

“The performance and the party will both help in defining the space. Both are meant to do justice to the closing of the installation, and hopefully pass the baton to open the space up to another institution,” Green said. “It’s about turning something over. There’s a cyclical nature to it all. But we’ll be saying goodbye and see what’s on the horizon.”

After the closure of Marfa Contemporary, Green heads to El Paso, where she will work in the curatorial staff of the El Paso Museum of Art under new museum director Victoria Ramirez.

“There’s a lot of energy in the arts, music, and culture in general in El Paso,” she said. “I’m excited to be there as the city grows, both in population and culturally.”

Kate Green

At the museum, Green will focus on bringing more attention to the museum using community outreach and by bringing in artists that would otherwise not be seen in the city.

“Many people fly in to El Paso and don’t bat an eye while driving to Marfa. I want to work with the community at large to bring more attention to the museum. It’s a massive space in a great location with really beloved work,” she said. “What I want to ask is, how can the museum be a catalyst for border conversations?”

One of her first tasks (she begins her new position Tuesday) is to assist in judging the 2018 Border Biennial, which this year is themed around the border.

“I’m looking forward to working with the team in El Paso,” she said, adding that though the submission deadline for the Border Biennial has passed, there will be another in two years. “I hope to see more applicants for the next one.”

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Chinati artist in residence hosts open studio on New Year’s Day

Dec
21

Kate Newby

MARFA – On New Year’s Day, January 1, 2018, Chinati Foundation artist in residence Kate Newby will host an open studio and exhibition at the Locker Plant on East Oak Street from 3-5pm. Everyone is invited to stop by.

Working with a variety of media including installation, textile, ceramics, casting, and glass, Kate Newby is a sculptor who is committed to exploring and putting pressure on the limits and nature of sculpture. She is interested in not only space, volume, texture, and materials, but where and how sculpture happens. Varying in scale, her works are often fleeting in nature, as in the case of her ceramic skipping stones which she asks people to skip, while being photographed, on the street in a given city; or, in the gallery proper, in subtly but noticeably present architectural disruptions of the space itself. Newby’s work bears a strong link to not just the everyday but to the lived—it aims to experience as much as it generates experience, collecting and registering the traces of the passing world, which the work incorporates and is incorporated into. The handmade quality of Newby’s work is not merely romantic or retrograde but rather is the aesthetic byproduct of a position that embraces direct experience over the mediated.

Newby has been in residence at Chinati during November and December. A native of New Zealand, she currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.  She has shown her work internationally, including solo exhibitions in Auckland; Brussels; London; Los Angeles; New York; Melbourne; Mexico City; and Toronto. In January–March 2017 she was an artist in residence at Artpace, San Antonio, TX, and concluded her residency with the exhibition Let me be the wind that pulls your hair. In 2019 she will undertake projects at the 21st Biennale of Sydney, the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, and The Sunday Painter in London.

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Spend New Year’s Eve with Texas music legends

Dec
21

MARFA – Texas music legends Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock return to the Saint George Hall on Sunday, December 31st to welcome 2018 with special guests Colin Gilmore, Rory Hancock, the Mastersons, and Nic Armstrong & the Thieves.

Gilmore and Hancock are part of the legendary Lubbock trio, The Flatlanders, which also includes Joe Ely. It’s a father and son event, as Colin Gilmore and Rory Hancock are the sons of Jimmie Dale and Butch, who lives in Terlingua when he’s not on the performing road, both as a soloist and a Flatlander.

Reserved table seating includes a seasonal buffet dinner and selection of wine. General admission tickets are also available.

Doors open at 7:30 PM, and the party starts at 8pm. Space is limited – purchase your tickets now!

The New Year’s Eve at the Saint George Hall buffet dinner menu includes white truffle arancini with fennel orange confit | candied applewood smoked bacon strips | seasonal crudite display | assorted cheese and charcuterie display | field greens salad with gorgonzola, apple, and toasted walnuts | espresso crusted beef tenderloin | grilled lamb chop lollipops with mint chimichurri | herb-whipped potato puree | roasted winter vegetables | warm garlic knots | assorted chocolate truffles | fresh berry and champagne gelees.

Reservations and more information: 432.729.3700 | info@marfasaintgeorge.com.

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Marfa Contemporary exhibit closes with artist talk, reception

Nov
30

William Cordova

By JOHN DANIEL GARCIA

johndaniel@bigbendnow.com

MARFA – Marfa Contemporary’s latest and final artist-in-residence William Cordova will engage in a talk with Marfa Contemporary Guest Director Kate Green and fellow artists Robert Pruitt and Autumn Night, followed by a closing reception for Cordova’s exhibition, ankaylli: spatial and ideological terrain from 4–6pm Sunday, December 2.

The exhibition features an immersive installation of sculpture, painting, and includes an audio aspect; a culmination of the styles and experimentations the artist has developed in 10 years of artist residencies.

“My exhibits tend to be comprised of many components. I think it’s because my work has evolved over time,” Cordova told the Big Bend Sentinel. “After dropping out of a psychology program in med school, I did art residencies back-to-back for 10 years, evolving from one to the other, and branching out the entire time. This exhibition incorporates the nature of the works from my past exhibitions.”

One of the highlights of his Marfa Contemporary exhibit, he said, is the audio aspect of his show: a single vinyl record spinning on a turntable with headphones attached for visitors to listen one at a time.

The record, he explained, is only one of three which he had manufactured in the U.K. which depict the environmental sounds at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and a Lincoln Park churchyard, both in Chicago.

“When most people think of a vinyl record, they think of mass production and pop culture. We need to change the way we need pop culture by slowing down the visual and audio. I’m not making eye candy or even actual music, the recordings do have a rhythm. It’s a natural, improvised rhythm,” he said.

The source of the sounds, he added, are integral to the piece.

“There’s a relationship to socialism and transcendentalism, which is a philosophy Frank Lloyd Wright was interested in,” he said. “In the recordings, you can’t really hear that much traffic, but there are students at the Robie House who you can hear. At Lincoln Park, I recorded an anthill behind the church that [Puerto Rican leftist group] Young Lord Organization would feed children for free and give free medical tests. They practiced this social approach of organizing and working together. The ants kind of represent that part of society. In a way, it’s a way to preserve the essence of these realities on vinyl. I’m trying to capture this without pictures of structures or images of individuals without taking things out of context like pop culture does.”

The fact that his exhibit will be final showing at Marfa Contemporary fills Cordova with mixed feelings.

“It’s a place I always wanted to exhibit and a place I wanted to visit for a long time. It’s disappointing [that Marfa Contemporary is closing], but maybe it’s the end of one chapter but the start of something else,” he said.

As for his artist talk, Cordova plans to keep the conversation organic.

“Basically, I’m going to free style it,” he said. “I’m usually prepared and informed when I give talks, but I don’t write anything down. I never want to repeat myself. It will be a good conversation, though, with Kate, Robert, and Autumn. It will be a nice way to reconnect with the work at Marfa Contemporary and I think the audience will get a good insight to the work.”

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“Big Scary Clowns and Red Balloons as Guns” on Sul Ross stage Decemeber 1-2

Nov
30

ALPINE – “Big Scary Clowns with Red Balloons as Guns,” a one-man show written and performed by Sul Ross State University graduate student Miguel Pena will be on stage Friday-Saturday, December 1-2.

Show time is 8pm in the Studio Theatre, Francois Fine Arts Building. The play contains mature content and parental discretion is advised.

Peña’s one-man show examines life and death.

“This show is not a theatrical representation of a lone individual that suffered trials and tribulations. It’s a guy in his late 20’s who is given a stage and a chance to talk about things that he does in private.” he said. “At a time where most people spend a lot of time fighting over opinions, and politics, this show is a chance to see a small glimpse into one person. The only moral in the show, is the one that you create for yourself.”

Josh Martinez directs the production. Tickets are on sale now and are $5.00 for general admission.

For more information, call (432) 837-8218, tel:(432) 837-8218, or visit www.sulross.edu/theatre.

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