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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2011 > October > 11 > Entry
Move over Donald Judd
Plenty of art aficionados have journeyed out to Marfa, the tiny West Texas town that is home to the Chinati Foundation, the former army base that minimalist Donald Judd transformed into a permanent home for his artwork and that of a few select other artists.
In fact, Chinati — and by extension, Marfa — is something of a necessary pilgrimage for a certain cadre of the contemporary art crowd. If you haven’t been there, you haven’t earned your stripes.
And yet the schism between Marfa as an art destination and the town’s history as a ranching and farming center for a barren region of West Texas, couldn’t be more vast.
To explore the rift between the ‘arterati’ and long-time locals of Marfa, artist and West Texas native Josh T. Franco has enlisted some colleagues — Allison Kuo, Natalie Goodnow and Joshua Saunders — to create a multi-pronged creative response.
On the grounds of Co-Lab Space in East Austin, Franco will install a reproduction in miniature of the Chinati Foundation and all its works by Judd.
The interior of Co-Lab will be transformed into a loose reproduction of the interior of home of the late Hector Sanchez. The home is just outside the Chinati gates. In 1994, Sanchez witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary in his yard and built an altar to mark the miracle which then became a pilgrimage site of its own, vastly different from the art-centered one next door.
Franco has named the project ‘Marfita,’ the Spanish diminutive of Marfa. Franco is the grandchild of Mexican American farmworkers whose home base between seasonal labor migrations was Marfa. Read Franco’s cogent introduction to the project here.
On Saturday, there will be a procession through Co-Lab’s East Austin neighborhood that will culminate in a ceremonial prayer at the re-imagined altar.
‘Marfita’ 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday. Exhibit continues through Oct. 29. Co-Lab Space, 613 Allen St. Free www.colabspace.org
Image: Shrine to the Virgin Mary in the home of the late Hector Sanchez, Marfa, Texas. Photo courtesy Alison Kuo.
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