“Is this your first trip to Marfa?” our landlord for the weekend asked. It was, we answered. “Well, I don’t think it’ll be your last.”
I think she’s right.
As soon as we learned that David’s brother Seth would marry his fiancee Lizzie in Marfa, Texas, David (always thinking ahead –small town, big wedding) jumped online and found us a great little house to rent. (When we mailed our rent check we discovered that our Marfa landlords also lived across the street from us in New York). Their smart, art-filled home, called Windmill Retreat after the beautiful old windmill structures on the site, was the perfect base from which we could explore Marfa and participate in the wedding festivities while still attending to the needs of two year-old Julia.
Marfa is a town of about 2100 people set in the starkly beautiful desert of West Texas, about three hours drive from either El Paso or Midland. In the early 1970s the minimalist artist Donald Judd rented a house in Marfa and then began acquiring property in and around the town to permanently site large scale works of art. By the 1980s Marfa was best known for its art. The town houses very large and elaborate installations of contemporary art by Judd, Dan Flavin and others at the Chinati Foundation and Judd Foundation, both founded by the late artist. A particularly spectacular example is a work by Donald Judd comprised of 100 aluminum boxes placed in two former army munitions warehouses, opened on their sides to let in sweeping views of the desert landscape.
It wasn’t art that brought us to Marfa, though. Lizzie grew up on a nearby (in West Texas terms) cattle ranch that has been in her family for generations, and so Marfa is her hometown. And a special town it is –sophisticated and simple, funky but friendly, spruced up, but not exactly gentrified. It’s a town where the friendly gallery owner turned out to be a prominent artist, gave Julia paper and pencils to draw with while she showed us around her studio, and, we learned, had given the restaurant where we’d dined the night before tomatoes from her garden because they’d run out.
Downtown Marfa with its historic courthouse. Wedding guests were served breakfast and lunch from vintage chuckwagons on the courthouse lawn.
Even if Julia doesn’t have another gig in town as a flower girl, we’ll be back.
