HWY 90 Gallery to Show New Work by Tad Wiley

Recent paintings by New York-based artist Tad Wiley will be on display at HWY 90 Gallery in Marfa from March 4 through May 27 2006. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday evening, April 21. Wiley’s work is composed of abstract, geometric forms that evoke the austere power of iconic architectural edifices. Each image is suffused with an evanescent quality of light created by the application of many layers of translucent color applied to a smooth surface. The paintings are animated by the tension between the stark geometric shapes and the shimmering depth of the layers of color.

“As far as inspiration, my thinking is usually influenced by my environment and, more specifically, the effects of natural phenomena on everyday objects, where a situation of stasis and flux may occur simultaneously.”

Wiley has been the recipient of fellowships from both the Pollack/Krasner Foundation and the Edward Albee Foundation. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles, and is included in private and corporate collections in the United States, Europe and Japan. He first visited Marfa in 1996. “Having worked with Dia Art Foundation and many of its artists from 1979-1985, I wanted to see the Judd and Chamberlain installations in this unique setting,” said Wiley. “To a greater extent, the Southwest landscape has always interested me, with its sense of scale and isolation. Marfa seems to have a combination of elements that make it an appealing place to show my work. I like the openness in both attitude and geography, and because of Marfa's relative newness as an art-based community, there is a lot of genuine excitement directed toward new people and projects.”

HWY 90 Gallery, which opened in 2005, is located in a storefront that was recently renovated by Marfa mayor David Lanman. The gallery is located across the street from Donald Judd’s private residence (commonly called the Block).

35 Judd Sculptures to be Auctioned at Christie's

[New York Times] "Christie's is treating the sale as an event to attract art lovers as well as potential buyers. From April 1 through May 9, the works will be on view on the 20th floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas, at 49th Street, where Christie's has rented 16,000 square feet. Flavin Judd, the artist's son, will collaborate on the installation with Christie's experts, and a special catalog will include unpublished essays by Mr. Judd.
"This will be the largest grouping of Judd's work on view in this country since the last major retrospective, which was at the Whitney in 1988," said Brett Gorvy, a co-head of postwar and contemporary art for Christie's worldwide. "Many of the works for sale were also in the Tate's exhibition last year." ...

Not everyone agrees... "I have a different view," said Ms. Stockebrand, director of the Chinati Foundation... "I was in favor of a slower approach, to sell things one at a time and place them in collections carefully, which would have been better for Judd's legacy. With auctions, you have no control over where things go."

full article here

On the Screen at the Library

Western Double Feature tonight, 7 PM (note earlier time)

Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now (1956)
Ben Stride (Randolph Scott) used to be keeper of the peace when he was sheriff of Silver Springs. But since his wife's murder during a Wells Fargo office holdup, Stride has made it his mission to hunt down her killers and make them pay. When he crosses paths with scoundrel Bill Masters (Lee Marvin) and his cohort (Donald Barry), Stride gets closer to his mark -- but things are not what they seem in director Budd Boetticher's classic Western.

High Noon (1952)
Retiring Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) insists on defending his town from a gang of hooligans who are due on the noon train -- but he faces the task alone as the cowardly townspeople flee like rats from a sinking ship. Director Fred Zinnemann creates an incredibly tense Western (rightly considered one of the true genre classics) that unfurls in real time -- as the clocks on the wall constantly remind us.

RED WHITE BLUE at Marfa Book Co. Gallery

New paintings and drawings by Leslie Wilkes are on display at the Marfa Book Co. Gallery from now until April 12, 2006. This exhibition continues the artist's investigation in pattern painting and geometric abstraction. The six paintings and 20 gouaches on display are all variations on a single geometric pattern. The palette of these works reflects the abundance of red, white and blue (on bumper stickers, grocery bags, campaign signs, license plates and the ubiquitous Texas flag), in this otherwise neutral Far West Texas landscape. The resulting compositions are like Rorschach blots of the night sky, cowboy gear, a Mexican dance and even the lyrics of an old Texas blues song.

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Lee Stringer Gives "Internal View" of a Difficult Life
[Larchmont Gazette] It was his dual activities – writer and motivator – that earned him a prestigious residency fellowship in Marfa, Texas with the Lannan Foundation for 2005. The exact criteria and selection process is kept a mystery by the foundation – you don’t apply, but are nominated without your knowledge by someone who knows your work. At the end of last year, he was able to make considerable headway on his writing as he spent two months, all expenses paid, in a beautiful desert retreat owned by the foundation. This was quite a contrast from his original writing “retreat” – underneath Grand Central Station...

Fashion Meets West Texas in Unlikely Art Project
Squeeze Marfa's Online Store

New Film Label Arthouse to Release Donald Judd's Marfa, Texas (1998) this year. The 30 minute documentary by San Francisco filmmaker Christopher Felver includes Judd's last known interview which is interwoven with criticism by John Yau.

Marfa Public Radio Hits the Airwaves

West Texans to have NPR Option on Radio Dial
[Fort Worth Star Telegram] There aren’t many places where the start of a new radio station would attract the likes of Dan Rather and Willie Nelson.But in far West Texas, where the crackle of static is often all you’ll hear as you surf the radio dial, a new station is big news.On Monday, Rather will help dedicate Marfa’s National Public Radio affiliate, KRTS, a 100,000-watt station that should be able to reach out-of-the-way places like Sierra Blanca, Van Horn and portions of Big Bend National Park. While urban exiles in Marfa, Fort Davis and Alpine may appreciate the programming, it remains to be seen if this staunchly independent region will...

Outsiders Find West Texas, and Public Radio Follows
[New York Times] Marfa, a town in far West Texas, may seem an unlikely home for public radio, but a new FM station is being launched to serve urban refugees...
NYTimes.com Map of Marfa Area

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Portugal (almost) Wins Race to Show Billionaire’s Collection
Collection of Presidio Links
On the Screen at the Library
- Tonight, Friday, Feb 10, 8 pm The Last Seduction (1994) R
- Saturday, Feb 11, 8 pm Mother & Son (2000) Unrated
David Byrne Reviews Dia Beacon & MASS MoCA

Artists for Chinati: A Sale of Donated Works

The Chinati Foundation will hold a benefit sale at Phillips de Pury & Company on Monday, March 13, 2006. All works of art to be sold have been donated by the individual artists to support Chinati’s effort to match a $5 million challenge grant issued by Lannan Foundation and the Leonard Riggio family for the museum’s Endowment Fund.

Artists for Chinati will present a wide range of donated sculptures, paintings, photographs, and drawings by more than 50 internationally recognized artists. The sale will feature significant works by artists represented in Chinati’s permanent collection including Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Carl Andre, Ilya Kabakov, Roni Horn, and John Wesley. The art works will be available for public viewing at Phillips de Pury from March 4 through 12. A 4:00 p.m. cocktail reception, hosted by former Chinati Foundation Board of Directors member Tommy Lee Jones, will precede the live auction on March 13 at 5:00 p.m.

Artists for Chinati will include work by the following:
Carl Andre, Ingolfur Arnarsson, John Beech, John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Deacon, Rupert Deese Sr., Rupert Deese, Jan Dibbets, Rackstraw Downes, Jeff Elrod, Sharon Engelstein, Tony Feher, Mark Flood, Maureen Gallace, Katharina Grosse, Marcia Hafif, Mona Hatoum, Georg Herold, Jene Highstein, Roni Horn, Robert Irwin, Matthew Day Jackson, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Craig Kauffman, Harriet Korman, Robert Mangold, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Cornelia Parker, Jack Pierson, Ken Price, David Rabinowitch, Erwin Redl, David Reed, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Susie Rosmarin, Fred Sandback, Karin Sander, Wilhelm Sasnal, Andreas Karl Schulze, Joel Shapiro, Kate Shepherd, James Siena, Billy Sullivan, Stephen Vitiello, John Waters, William Wegman, John Wesley, Emi Winter, and Jeff Zilm.

The Chinati Foundation was founded by Donald Judd as a unique art museum where large-scale works of art, or large groups of art, are installed on a permanent basis according to each artist’s specifications. It was Judd’s goal at Chinati to bring art, architecture, and nature together in order to form a coherent whole. The mission is to preserve Judd’s vision by conserving and making available to the public the art works, buildings, and surrounding landscape at the museum, while maintaining the supporting and educational programs Judd initiated. Judd created Chinati as a situation for his own work as well as that of other artists, and the museum is honored to have more than 50 distinguished artists donating work to support the museum’s Endowment Fund. The benefit sale is one component of Chinati’s campaign to match the requirements of a $5 million challenge grant it received in 2005. The grant will be administered by Dia Art Foundation, the original patron of Judd’s projects at Chinati, and funded by long-term museum supporters Lannan Foundation and Leonard Riggio, Dia’s Chairman, and his family. The grant’s aim is to create the organization’s first substantial endowment, one that will ensure the vitality of Chinati’s programs and activities for years to come.

A full-color catalog of the art works to be auctioned will be available in advance of the sale, and the works will be viewable at http://www.phillipsdepury.com/. During the auction, absentee bidding by telephone will be accepted. Work will be on view at Phillips de Pury from March 4 through March 12. Phillips de Pury is located at 450 West 15th Street in New York City.

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The Three Burials, Tommy Lee Jones
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is set along the U.S-Mexico border in far west Texas. Jones plays the part of a rancher who befriends a Mexican ranch hand whose murder sets the brutal and lonesome film into motion. In a recent interview in LA Weekly, Jones discusses some of his unlikely influences for the film.
Q: In the press notes, you’ve cited several filmmakers and artists as sources of visual inspiration for the film, some of which, like Sam Peckinpah and Akira Kurosawa, are easy to understand; others of which, like the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd and installation artist Dan Flavin, are a little farther afield.
Jones: I would often sit around the monitor while things were being set up and ask different people if they thought there was any emotion in geometry. And they would say, “What?” And I would say, “Do you have any feeling for triangles? Hexagons?” There’s a geometry to the film that I find very pleasing. I think Judd’s work is highly intellectual and deeply emotional. And of course the influence of Flavin is obvious in the lighting, but nowhere more so than in the scene at the clinic where the border patrolman gets cured of his snakebite.
full article

Recent Additions to the Marfa.Org Gallery
Exhaustive Study of Marfa Lights
- compilation of geology and oil prospecting notes
Cal. State University Museum to Tour Marfa in May

On the Screen at the Library
Days of Heaven (1978) PG, Friday, Feb 3, 8 pm
Director Terrence Malick's beautifully shot period piece tells the story of Bill (Richard Gere), an early-1900s Chicago steel mill worker who flees town after accidentally killing a man. He moves his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and younger sister to the wheat fields of Texas to search for a better life. Instead, they run into tragedy when a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard) falls for Abby. The film's cinematography earned an Oscar.