As MoMA opens a major retrospective of the American minimalist Donald Judd, Rima Suqi looks at how the remote desert town became a cultural hub.
This is shaping up to be a banner year for the late American artist Donald Judd. His first US retrospective in over three decades opens this weekend at MoMA in New York. Alongside it is "Prints: 1992", an exhibition at the Judd Foundation in SoHo featuring 20 of the artist’s late-period woodcut prints on paper, curated by his son Flavin. A book, "Donald Judd Spaces", offering a glimpse into his living and working spaces (ranging from the 1870 classic cast-iron SoHo building he bought in 1968 to a 40,000-acre ranch bordering the Rio Grande), will be published in a few days. And basking in this glow is the tiny town of Marfa, Texas, where the godfather of minimalism (though he loathed the term) created one of the world’s largest permanent installations of contemporary art – some of it, significantly, set outside in the scrubby brush.
Judd unwittingly contributed to transforming the town into not only a pilgrimage site for art and architecture aficionados, but also, post his death in 1994, into a bucket-list destination. Those who come today may not even have heard of Judd, but have connected with the town’s growing cultural significance via Beyoncé on Instagram, or because they want to pop by that much-photographed Prada “store”. Judd’s Chinati Foundation estimates it’ll have 50,000 visitors this year, up from 12,500 just seven years ago, while Marfa Invitational, an international art fair that debuted last year, promises to be an annual event.
But how did Marfa transform into a destination that appeals to such a wide audience and a moniker found on luxury goods including a perfume by Memo Paris and stiletto boots by Tamara Mellon? Judd first travelled here in 1971. “I wanted to be in the southwest of the United States and be near Mexico, and also to have room for large permanent installations of my work as well as room to install work by other artists,” he noted in his book "Donald Judd Writings". Essentially, he was looking for space.