Snowy Marfa, December 2012. Courtesy of Food Shark.

The Ballroom Marfa gallery will be closed from December 22-January 7. For holiday shopping, any items ordered after December 19th will not ship until after January 4th. For any questions, please email [email protected], and we will respond upon our return. Have a merry holiday, and see you next year!

There is still a bit of water remaining in the ethanol at this point, so it is then dehydrated in a molecular sieve system to remove this last 5%, increasing the alcohol level to 200 proofThe 2009 Pew Global Attitudes survey found that many believed the new American president would act multilaterally, seek international approval before using military force, take a fair approach to the Israeli Palestinian conflict and make progress on climate change. 1 ranked Tigers captured five individual conference championships Sunday at Hearnes Center and for the first time in program history crowned a four time conference champion. After those games and several multi team events, Rutgers had one opening on its schedule and a desire to stay locally with Big Ten travel looming. The Middle East, which is currently dealing with large numbers of low skilled immigrants from south Asia, seems to be a hotbed of racial tension,

Artist Sam Falls contributes to a conversation with the Wall Street Journal about L.A.’s steadily growing art scene and the Southland’s laid-back vibes. A solo exhibition from Falls will open at Ballroom Marfa this coming March.

From The Wall Street Journal:

“The pace here is more organic,” says Sam Falls as he walks through his current exhibition at the gallery. His pieces—large negative silhouettes created in part by leaving foliage (ferns, palm fronds) on raw canvas out in the rain—are big, ambitious and all about process. He works on some of the larger-scale projects from several spaces, including a converted knitting factory in Glendale and a parking lot near Pomona. “You can get to the next level of your work in a more fluid way here,” says Falls. “Art needs to be incubative…[People] move to New York to become artists with a capital A. Not here,” says Sam Falls. Sure, there is an art market, and there are openings and power players, but there is a welcoming, communal vibe to it all. “I see making my art as almost a blue-collar job.

Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972- 1975, 16’01”. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30 Gallery, Warsaw.

Future Ballroom Marfa curator, Tom Morton, recently curated a show entitled Panda Sex that runs from November 29 through January 2015 at State of Concept, a non-profit gallery based in Athens, Greece. Tom Morton will curate Ballroom’s Marfa’s Fall 2015 group exhibition, Äppärät.. Tom Morton is also a writer, and contributing editor of frieze magazine. His previous exhibitions include Mum & Dad Show (Cubitt Gallery London, 2007), How to Endure (1st Athens Biennial, 2007), British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (Hayward Gallery London and touring, 2010-2011, co-curated with Lisa LeFeuvre) among many others.

An excerpt from State of Concept:

Twelve notes on ‘Panda Sex’:

1) ‘Panda Sex’ is not a group show that is ‘about’ this or that.

2) ‘Panda Sex’ is group show that is.

3) A thing that is has characteristics, ways of being.

4) ‘Panda Sex’ draws its characteristics from the species Alluropoda melanoleuca – the giant panda bear.

5) ‘Panda Sex’ is composed mostly of black and white works – including paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, performances, sounds and smells – with occasional passages of colour. (Panda bears, of course, are colorful in the hidden zones of their bodies: their tongues, their gums, their genitals).

6) ‘Panda Sex’ is composed mostly of works that pay little attention to sexuality. (Panda bears have a notoriously brief breeding season, as fleeting as three days per year, making the ongoing survival of this species a conservational miracle. The current planetary population of wild pandas is estimated at 1,600)

7) ‘Panda Sex’ has no headline theme, no explicit thesis, no apparent claim to make about the shape of art, or of the world. All that seems to connect the works it brings together are their black and white livery, a few flashes of colour, and flickers, here and there, of sexual desire. It is a show that practices extreme curatorial restraint. (Panda bears, although able to metabolize a wide range of meats and vegetation, prefer to subsist on a diet that is 99% bamboo. In her 2013 essay Radical Bears in the Forest Delicious, the nature writer Amy Leach posits that ‘Pandas have their own wisdom, unaccountable and unamendable, whose roots shoot down deeper than we can penetrate, and if they mind anyone at all it is someone more elusive than man’).

8) ‘Panda Sex’ is concerned with how, not what, an exhibition might mean. It takes it as axiomatic that the work of art will always exceed its exhibition context. This is perhaps best contemplated while chewing on a mouthful of bamboo.

Take a listen to the DJ soundtrack to our 2014 Benefit Gala,

This video presented by London’s Whitechapel Gallery highlights the 2014 season of works for Artists’ Film International, a collection of artists’ film, video and animation from around the world. Among the artists highlighted is Nicole Miller, who will be featured in Ballroom’s sixth installment of Artist’s Film International. Artist’s Film International is on view November 22-January 11, 2015 at Ballroom Marfa, with an opening reception on November 22 from 6-8pm. Click here for all the details.

The video also includes work from artists Jorge Macchi (Argentina), Angela Su (China), Oded Hirsch (Israel) and Provmyza Group (Russia).

A description of Nicole Miller’s piece from Whitechapel:

Untitled (David) (2012) by Nicole Miller observes a man the artist encountered by chance on the street.
He recounts the events leading to the amputation of his left arm whilst his right limb is reflected in a mirror,

Sam Falls
Untitled (California Palm Rubbing 10), 2014
colored pencil on paper
24 × 18 in
61 × 45.7 cm
Courtesy of the artist; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

As we make the final preparations for our 2014 NYC Benefit Gala on November 10 as the Prince George Ballroom, we’d like to draw your attention to some of the works that are included in the benefit auction. Artsy, the leading resource for art collecting and education, will host the online auction preview. Bidding on lots will launch on November 4, at 12 PM ET and will close on Artsy on November 10 at 3 PM, at which point bids for all lots will be transferred and executed at the event.

Click here to view on Artsy.

For more information, contact Artsy’s Tania Cavallo at 914.484.6409 or [email protected].

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s exhibition, Sound Speed Marker will be closing this Sunday, October 26. Come out and see it if you haven’t already!

Here’s a brief overview of other’s thoughts about the exhibition:

From Art in America:

Hubbard and Birchler’s rigorous anatomy of a monument in eclipse is exceptionally soulful and also sublime. You look at and through it, toward the immense landscape and sky. Interspersed shots of desert plants, rain and wind, and ants swarming a grasshopper carcass underscore that the threadbare movie set is now part of, and dominated by, nature. Made from and about Texas, and shown in Texas, the exhibition was altogether superb.

From Artforum:

“Sound Speed Marker” continues the inquiry that Giant refines in two earlier documentary explorations that likewise explore the ways film’s past-tense fictions permeate real geographies in the present…Well cited at Ballroom, Marfa, just down the road from Donald Judd’s utopia, all three films encourage the viewer to consider the specificity of any locality, even when just passing through.

From Glasstire:

Giant dispenses with spoken language altogether, and the convention of talking-head interviews. There are no “real” people telling their stories. The site of the historical movie is not defined by absence, as in the previous two videos. Instead, the history is concrete and well documented, which seems to grant license to Hubbard and Birchler to push further away from narrative. In this, they achieve fantastic visual pleasure with the landscape scenes in the present.

From an interview in Bomb:

IA All three works in Sound Speed Marker—Movie Mountain, Grand Paris Texas, and Giant—reference Hollywood movies that use Texas as a backdrop, either physically or as a concept. For me, there’s a sense that the Hollywood movies are somehow mining the state’s status as an untamed landscape independent of the rule of law. Watching Giant in particular I came to think of these Hollywood studios as some version of oil prospectors, trying to extract from the setting whatever they could. What’s the relationship between Hollywood and Texas for you?

AB…The works in Sound Speed Marker certainly explore some paradigms of the western. Over the course of developing the component works for Sound Speed Marker, we considered a number of different sites around the country and even a couple of sites in Europe. The three sites we chose to commit to and explore over time were challenging and resonant for us on a number of exciting and unknown levels.

© Photo by Alexei Tylevich

For our friends in London: On October 9th, Comic Future alum Walead Beshty’s new exhibition will open at the The Curve in the Barbican Centre. Entitled A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench, the show features over 12,000 cyanotype prints made by Beshty that will cover the wall of The Curve gallery from floor to ceiling.

More from the Barbican Center:

“The installation is presented in chronological order, allowing the work to be read as a visual timeline, shifting in appearance along with the artist’s physical and temporal location. A central platform specially designed by London-based David Kohn Architects and constructed using recycled materials from a previous Barbican exhibition, enables the visitor to view the installation from alternative perspectives…Walead Beshty’s artwork explores photography’s ability to capture contemporary social and political conditions, often making the viewer question the possibilities of photography and its relationship to the world we live in.”

In a related event: Beshty and writer/critic Brian Dillon will have an in-depth discussion of the artist’s practice on November 26 at the Barbican Center.

Photo courtesy the Menil Collection, Houston

MARFA, TX – Ballroom Marfa’s board of directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Susan Sutton as its new executive director. Sutton comes to Marfa after a four-year tenure at Houston’s Menil Collection, where, as assistant curator, she most recently organized A Thin Wall of Air: Charles James (2014), an exhibition exploring the work of the celebrated designer in relation to John and Dominique de Menil, two of his most committed patrons.

Fairfax Dorn, Ballroom Marfa’s co-founder and outgoing executive director, will transition to the role of artistic director, where she will work with Sutton in conceiving and implementing the creative and strategic vision for the Marfa-based non-profit. Dorn has served as executive director of Ballroom Marfa since she founded the organization with Virginia Lebermann in 2003. Lebermann is currently president of Ballroom Marfa’s board of directors.

“Ballroom Marfa has an extraordinary history,” says Sutton. “I am awed by the inspired risk the founders took to build it. I come from an institution where the founders believed in Texas, saw its potential, and wanted to create a world class place for the arts, on par with New York or Paris, and with intense loyalty to Houston. I see this same inspiration and loyalty guiding Ballroom Marfa. Ballroom is a nimble space that seeks out experimentation, supports emerging artists, and bridges different disciplines in the arts through its holistic point of view, which is extremely exciting to me.”

“Susan’s background includes scholarship, curation and the management of exhibitions at one of North America’s most significant museum collections,” says Dorn. “The diverse experience she brings from the Menil make her an ideal person to guide Ballroom Marfa as we continue with our ambitious plans for the future.”

Sutton joined the Menil Collection’s curatorial department in 2010, and was promoted to assistant curator in 2014. Sutton curated The Menil’s recent exhibition, A Thin Wall of Air: Charles James (2014), with interviews and features appearing in System magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, New York Magazine and on Houston PBS. Sutton managed the exhibition Byzantine Things in the World (2013), contributing a major essay, “Resistant Surfaces,” to its catalogue. In 2012, Sutton led the management of The Progress of Love, an international simultaneous three-venue exhibition with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. In conjunction with The Progress of Love, she launched the Menil’s first exhibition related website. She was also a contributor to African Art from the Menil Collection (2008).

After a series of productive negotiations with the Texas Department of Transportation, Prada Marfa is officially saved. The official statement from TxDOT’s Veronica Beyer is below. More details coming from Art Production Fund,Ballroom Marfa and Elmgreen & Dragset next week!

 

As of February 1, 2014, the Ballroom Marfa Foundation, a domestic nonprofit corporation, has leased the property on which the building stands. The site is now an art museum site and the building is their single art exhibit. As such, associated signage on the building is now considered to be an “on-premise” sign under state rules and does not require a state permit under the Highway Beautification Act.

The lease is currently being reviewed, but with the execution of the lease,

the complaint file will be closed.

 

Ballroom Marfa is immensely grateful for the outpouring of support that we’ve received for Prada Marfa. To read more about Elmgreen & Dragset’s iconic sculptural installation, please visit our official Prada Marfa Explainer.

For more background on the TxDOT decision, see Juan Carlos Llorca’s story for the Associated Press.

If you’d like to support Ballroom Marfa as we continue to maintain the Prada Marfa site, and as we embark on even more inspiring and provocative public art projects, please become a member today! Click here to learn more.