Saturday, June 3rd

Sunday, June 4th

Join Ballroom Marfa and Big Bend Conservation Alliance for Decolonizing the Fence at Cementerio del Barrio de Los Lipanes held during the Agave Festival Marfa.

On Saturday, June 3rd a panel discussion will be held. Panelists will discuss the current protection project of Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes (Cemetery of the Lipan Neighborhood), a sacred site to the Lipan Apache Tribe. Panelists include Christina Hernandez, Joseph Kunkel, Xoxi Nayapiltzin, Oscar Rodriguez, and Mayrah Udvardi with moderator Annie Rosenthal of Marfa Public Radio.

On Sunday, June 4th an architect walk-through of Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes will take place.

Check back soon for more details!

Opening Celebrations

unlit: sof landin  & Tongues of Fire

Public Opening

Friday, May 26 from 6–9pm

Artist & Curator-Led Walkthrough

Saturday, May 27 from 12–1:30pm

Join us for the Opening Celebrations of unlit: sof landin and Tongues of Fire on Friday, May 26 and Saturday, May 27, 2023. 

Opening Celebrations for the Spring 2023 exhibitions will kick off with the Public Opening on Friday, May 26 from 6–9pm featuring special performances, music, and drinks. Artist and curator-led walkthroughs of the exhibitions will take place on Saturday, May 27 from 12–1:30pm. Both events are free and open to all!

Tongues of Fire is a group exhibition featuring work by artists who engage with language. The exhibiting artists examine and reinterpret the ways in which language has been suppressed, hidden, and lost, but also has the potential for advocacy, humor, wonder, and pleasure. We continue to transform our means of communication and mediation of relationships through words that can be read, seen, and experienced anew. Tongues of Fire features work by Jorge Méndez Blake, Jesse Chun, Adriana Corral, and JJJJJerome Ellis, with contributions from Nakai Flotte.

Tongues of Fire is organized by Ballroom Marfa Director and Curator Daisy Nam, with assistance from Alexann Susholtz, Ballroom Marfa Curatorial and Exhibitions Assistant.

Closing Celebrations of Ecstatic Land & Kenneth Tam

You’re invited May 5–6, 2023 as we celebrate the closing of two exhibitions Ecstatic Land and Kenneth Tam: Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory.

Ecstatic Land is an exhibition and screening series that brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose works explore the intersecting vitalities of the land and self.

Kenneth Tam’s solo exhibition, Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory unearths forgotten histories in order to reimagine our own identities and to question dominant myths that shape and govern our bodies.

We hope you’ll join us!

9:02 PM: stone circle Full Moon Activation 

 12 – 1pm: Coffee & Conversation with Karina Salcido in Ballroom Gallery

Drop by from 7 to 10pm: Ecstatic Land screening series & lighting of Nancy Holt’s Starfire in Ballroom Courtyard

Opening Celebration

Ecstatic Land  &

Kenneth Tam: Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory

November 12, 4-7 pm

Join us for the Opening Celebration of Ecstatic Land and Kenneth Tam: Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory on Saturday, November 12 from 4–7pm.

The special evening will include film screenings, Nancy Holt’s Starfire, and performances starting at 6pm by Christie Blizard and Laura Ortman. There will be music and drinks. Free and open to all!

Thank you to our sponsors, Marfa Wine Co.

October 26, 2022 –May 2023

Ballroom Courtyard

Sundown until 10pm

Join us from sundown until 10pm for the Ecstatic Land film series in the Ballroom Courtyard and the Marfa Public Library. 

October 26– 29: 

Alan Michelson, Wolf Nation, 2018. 9:59 minutes. 

November 2– 5: 

Genesis Báez, Nubes (Clouds), 2019. 6:45 minutes.

November 9–12: 

Christie Blizard, Plant Songs, 2021-2022. 16 minutes. 

Sondra Perry, I Make Land Art Now, 2015. 2:41 minutes

Christie Blizard, Cactus, 2020, 4:47 minutes. 

March 16, 2023 at Marfa Public Library: 

Isuma, One Day in the Life of Noah Pittuagatuk, 2019. Directed by Zacharias Kunuk. 113 minutes. 

Ecstatic Land is an exhibition and screening series that brings together a multigenerational group of artists whose works explore the intersecting vitalities of the land and self. The word ecstatic comes from the Greek ἔκστασις [ekstasis], meaning “to stand outside oneself.” In nature, and particularly in the vast expanses of the desert, one can experience physical contact with the earth while being emotionally and psychologically transported elsewhere. This affect, present in the artworks in Ecstatic Land, connects material and exterior sites with interior, emotional, psychic states. Land is celebrated as a living force, and the exhibiting artists’ photographs, paintings, films, videos, sculptures, and sounds harmonize the pleasures of seeing what’s around us with those of inward reflection. 

Western art-historical traditions of the landscape genre largely focus on the framing of particular views of nature, often as demonstrations of power and control. And while the artists in Ecstatic Land each reference the natural world, they are not creating landscapes per se. Rather than reproducing or framing views, their works reveal new subjectivities and methods for perceiving shared environments. These artworks transport us beyond sight, reconnecting us to the world through embodied experiences. Challenging and expanding single-point perspectives, these artists offer personal views that would otherwise be invisible, intangible or overlooked. Their approaches run counter to the privatization, misuse, and over-consumption of common spaces and resources. Ecstatic Land proposes ways to live dynamically, critically, queerly, and consciously on and with the land.

Ecstatic Land is co-organized by Guest Curator Dean Daderko and Ballroom Marfa Director and Curator Daisy Nam, with assistance from Alexann Susholtz, Ballroom Marfa Curatorial and Exhibitions Assistant.

Kenneth Tam’s solo exhibition Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory features a series of commissioned sculptures alongside a two-channel video installation. In his exhibition, Tam unearths forgotten histories in order to reimagine our own identities and to question dominant myths that shape and govern our bodies. One of the most enduring myths that still haunts our nation is Manifest Destiny and the conquest of the American West. These ideologies have circulated and remain embedded in popular culture through Westerns and advertising, such as the figure of the Marlboro Man. These images reified claims to Indigenous land as well as distorted Indigenous histories, while also enforcing stereotypes of Anglo-American masculinity that remain pervasive. 

Tam’s examination of American westward expansion is rooted in the unrecorded lives of nameless Chinese laborers, who toiled under the most physically arduous conditions in the late nineteenth century. Silent Spikes, the video installation on view at Ballroom, weaves together improvised dialogue and movement sequences from a group of participants, along with semi-fictional scenes of a Chinese worker from inside the tunnels of the Transcontinental Railroad. During Tam’s site visit to West Texas in 2021, his encounter with artifacts and fragments of objects left at workers’ camps along the railroad led him to consider how physical remnants function as stand-ins for the disappeared histories of laborers. Tam’s sculptures suggest other ways of thinking about these men. His use of archaeological fragments as visual and material language complicates the simple narratives that have been constructed about migrant lives. In their lifetimes, Chinese laborers were reviled for their race but praised for their industriousness, their worth as people always tied to their ability to labor. Bits of dried food, broken jewelry and other personal items are integrated into the sculptures to point to experiences of precarity, but also tenderness and care. Physical traces–and even the sounds of the railroad passing through Marfa still today–can serve as reminders of how this nation was built, and by whom. 

Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory is organized by Daisy Nam, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director and Curator with assistance from Alexann Susholtz, Exhibitions and Curatorial Assistant.

On Sunday, October 9, 2022 from X to X, Ballroom Marfa invites the public to join us and the Land Arts program for coffee and conversation with Dr. C.J. Alvarez. In this special expanded classroom session at Ballroom Marfa, Dr. Alvarez will guide students and public participants in thoughtful discourse in response to The Blessings of the Mystery by Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas. Participants will have the opportunity to walk through the exhibition with Dr. Alvarez, Daisy Nam, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director and Curator, and Chris Taylor, Land Arts Director. Following the walkthrough, a conversation will take place with Dr. Alvarez, Chris Taylor, and the Land Arts students who will expand upon the environmental and art historical themes of the exhibition. This program will be the final day of The Blessings of the Mystery at Ballroom Marfa; we hope you’ll join us. 

Dr. C.J. Alvarez is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies. Dr. Alvarez is an environmental historian who writes about deserts, the built environment, and the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University is a transdisciplinary field program dedicated to expanding awareness of the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of our planet. The program leverages immersive field experience in the desert southwest as a primary pedagogic agent to support research that opens horizons of perception, probes depths of inquiry and advances understanding of human actions shaping environments. Land Arts attracts architects, artists, and writers from across the university and beyond to a “semester abroad in our own backyard” that travels 6,000 miles overland while camping for two months to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field—while also visiting sites to expand understanding of what land art might be, such as pre-contact archeology, military-industrial infrastructure, and sites of contemporary wilderness and waste. Throughout the travels, and on-campus, participants make work in response to their experience, which is exhibited at the Museum of Texas Tech University to conclude the field season.

Chris Taylor is the director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University and an Associate Professor of Architecture. He studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and has been with the College of Architecture since 2008.