October 22, 2021
Chris talks with Abby Boyd, Director of Tourism for the City of Marfa, about Alpine’s lovely neighbor to the west. We talk architecture, art, and hours of operation! Pro Tip: when in doubt, go to the Visitor Center!
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Transcript for “Visiting Marfa”:
Intro
Welcome to the heart of the Big Bend. It’s time to kick back, put your feet up, grab your favorite beverage or snack as we discussed, declare, proclaim, publicize and articulate about the wonders, magic, beauty, music and happenings here in the area known as the Big Bend of Texas.
Chris Ruggia
Hello welcome and thank you for joining us again for heart of the Big Bend. This is a podcast and radio show coming to you every other week about visiting the beautiful Big Bend of Texas. Specifically, we will cover what’s happening in Alpine, an incredibly friendly, small town nestled in a desert mountain valley at the heart of the Big Bend region. With easy day trips from Alpine, you can take in everything this amazing region has to offer.
I’m Chris Ruggia, Director of Tourism for the City of Alpine, and I’m thrilled today today to have with me, Abby Boyd, my counterpart, Director of Tourism for the City of Marfa, another incredibly friendly, beautiful small town in the Big Bend. So welcome, Abby. Thank you.
Abby Boyd
Thank you for having me, Chris. I’m so happy to be here. It’s an honor.
Chris R
It’s great to have you. So we talked on this podcast so far. We had a show early on about day trips, and we’ve talked about the parks and all those sorts of things. But this is our first more in depth conversation about one of our neighbors.
Abby B
Well, that’s awesome.
Chris R
In the northern part of the Big Bend, we have four little towns, all about a half hour jump from each other. We’ve got heading from the east, Marathon, and then Alpine. And then there’s a little triangle of Alpine, Marfa, and Fort Davis. And every one of these little towns has a totally different personality, a visual experience of seeing it, the landscape around it is all a little bit different. And so you could easily spend a week just in each one, wandering around.
Abby B
Totally.
Chris R
I thought we’d start with you’re coming to Marfa, and obviously, I want you to come to Marfa from Alpine, but a lot of people come from the other direction as well, from the west, from El Paso. Alpine’s surroundings, Alpine, as I said in the intro, it’s a mountain valley. You look around and you see that ridge all around the Glass Mountains and the Davis Mountains. But Marfa is completely different topographically. So what do you see as you’re driving towards Marfa?
Abby B
Well, I love the drive from Alpine to Marfa. As you’re leaving Alpine to the west, you’re coming through these mountains and around some beautiful curves, there’s some gorgeous mountains there. My favorite are the Twin Sisters. So you come through these mountain curves. You see some great topography. And then you come out of the Pass.
Chris R
Yeah, Paisano Pass.
Abby B
Paisano Pass. Yeah, you exit the Pass and the land just lays out in front of you, which is an incredible thing. And what I love about West Texas is there are these awesome changes. So Marfa is on a high desert plateau. So as you exit the pass, you just see long stretches of prairie grasslands, as far as the eye can see. It gets a lot flatter, but there are still some really beautiful mountains off in the distance. So this flat plateau is also just surrounded by beautiful mountains in the distance.
Chris R
For sure. And when I think about that landscape, it’s like when you’re near the mountains, the mountains take the foreground. But then when you come out of the path, it’s the sky. It’s this tableau of the sky. That’s where you feel those comparisons people make to the ocean, is when you’re around the Marfa area.
Abby B
Totally. Yeah. And that’s one of the things that we are so famous for. And I think Texas, in general, I think Texas has some of the most beautiful skies. But Marfa has what I call land as far as the eye can see and more stars than you can count. It’s just literally we’re surrounded by ranch land. So there are no structures, no buildings, no mountains close up that will obstruct your view of this incredibly vast land. And then beyond that, just wall to wall sky and ever changing. The seasons really are marked by the way the sky and the light changes out here.
Chris R
Absolutely. So then once we get into Marfa, what I think of is that distinguishes it is the way the town is laid out and the buildings. Particularly, the view up Highland Avenue towards the Presidio County Courthouse is iconic. I don’t think there’s as wide of a street. It is a state highway, oddly.
Abby B
It is, yeah.
Chris R
But still, it functions as the main street of downtown Marfa, and it is so wide and stately looking up to…it’s such a tableau of small town, downtown.
Abby B
It is. It’s picturesque. I think a lot of people compare Marfa to a movie set, and I think that that street is one of the more iconic scenes that you can put yourself in in Marfa. The street is super wide. It’s just a two way. And a lot of the buildings I’ve got in the Visitor Center in Marfa, two panoramic photos. One was taken in 1921 and the other was taken in 2021. And you can see that a lot has not changed. A lot of the more than half of those buildings are exactly the same as they were 100 years ago.
Chris R
Well, and that might be… It’s a really interesting situation physically that Marfa has, because you do get a sense of a coherence to the buildings. And perhaps it’s a lack of constant renovation and building over all the years that you see in Alpine. So Alpine, its architectural landscape is chaotic in comparison. It’s just a lot of new things that have come in, but continually throughout all these decades. Whereas Marfa was the same buildings left the same. And then the folks who came in when those renovations started were generally people really focused on design and simplicity of that design. So they kept possibly more of the original character than the same things that might have happened in a different town. That’s just a guess.
Abby B
Well, I think you might be right. Marfa had its renaissance during the World Wars. It was a military town. And when the Fort D. A. Russell was decommissioned in 1946, the population dropped from 5,000 to 2,000. The town was, I’m not going to say, well, it was in decline at that point. There wasn’t a lot of industry there. It was mostly ranchers. And not a lot was going on between ’46 and the late ’70s when Donald Judd came along. The artist from New York who is most known for his minimalist, some might call, sculptures.
Chris R
Yeah, he might not, but others may.
Abby B
He would not care for that term, but that’s okay.
Chris R
Yeah, Judd started the avalanche, you might say. When my wife and I moved here, it was just a few months after he died in 1994. And we knew about him. My wife and I went to art school, so we didn’t know his name. A lot of folks don’t, but they may or may not realize that he’s a staple of the survey. You take an art history class and he’s prominent in his time period.
Abby B
There’s a good chance, even if you don’t know his name, you might recognize some of his work if you have taken an art history class, Art History 101 in high school or college. One of his principals that he lived by, especially in Marfa. And it’s a wild thing that this New York artist, he wasn’t born in New York, but he was doing work in New York, came to this tiny little town, and people just can’t understand it. But I think he was really drawn there by the… Well, really, it was the space. I think it was both the space around the town, the landscape, the mental space, the lack of people, the quietness of the town. And then these buildings that you mentioned that are historic and have value in their history, but they were also just available. They were empty, and he could purchase them for a really small amount of money at the time.
Chris R
Yeah, especially compared to what he would be spending in Manhattan, say.
Abby B
Right. Or even in Marfa now.
Chris R
Right. Which is probably about what he would have spent in Manhattan at the time.
Abby B
Yeah, exactly. We’re a mini-Manhattan. And he didn’t make changes to those buildings. He wasn’t trying to eliminate the history there. He was keeping the history as part of what he was bringing to it. He was just adding to that history. I think that that’s something that our town has taken on. We love our historic structures. There’s no reason to demolish an adobe home and build a brand new home if we can just restore what’s already existing. Yeah. So I think a lot of people really hold those values today. We love the fact that our downtown has this history rather than tearing it down and building something new. Let’s just improve it. Let’s make it what we need it to be today and continue the history. We get to live in it and be it.
Chris R
You bet. So now we got a choice here. We can either keep on going with Judd into Chinati, but I realized that Chinati Foundation is one of the core Marfa attractions, for one of a better word. But the other is the Mystery Lights. So I’m like, A or B, what do you want to start with?
Abby B
Gosh, they’re both so good. Let’s start with the mystery light.
Chris R
Okay, and then we’ll go into the culture landscape. Okay.
Abby B
So I actually, I had not I’ve never heard of the mystery lights myself until the first time I came out to Marfa. I stopped at what was the Apache Trading Post right outside of Alpine.
Chris R
A business that was there for a long time, but then the owners retired.
Abby B
Yeah, now gone. But that was such a cool place. And I walked into the store and in the back room there was this video playing, which I think now plays at the Marfa Visitor Center about the Marfa Mystery Lights. And I was just like, what is this? So the Marfa Mystery Lights are an unexplained light phenomenon that has been at least documented in writing since the late 1800s.
Chris R
Before, let’s point out, before there were headlights, which is probably the most frequent attempted explanation of these lights. Yes.
Abby B
So this was first documented from a ranch hand well before cars. I mean, even today, there’s not tons traffic, but back then there was none.
Chris R
Right.
Abby B
And it’s some lights out on the horizon. So the initial explanation was maybe these are campfires that some of the native people, indigenous to this area, were setting up. So they would go out the next day and look for the evidence of the campfires and find nothing. Then many years later, when there was an airfield in that area, the airmen would see them. So they would drop sandbags out of their airplanes to mark the location they were seeing the lights, go the next day, find nothing. There’s been meteorologists, there’s been scientists, there’s been spiritualists coming out, trying to find some explanation. And there is, as of now, no definitive explanation for what’s causing these lights.
Chris R
When we first came out to the area, the Marfa Lights Festival, which still goes on, it is largely a musical, cultural gathering. But there was a panel discussion every year of people. And I never made it. But I always imagined it was a bunch of experts shrugging. Yeah. And saying, I don’t know either.
Abby B
I think that would be a great cartoon for a newspaper. I didn’t know about the panelists, but I’m bringing that back for sure. Okay. Yeah. There’s an Unsolved Mysteries episode on it, which I think is awesome. If you can make it to Unsolved Mysteries, you’ve made it.
Chris R
Right. And now at the spot where people most often would stop and get the best view, there’s actually a TXDOT rest area that with some binoculars, some things like that, that people can look at the horizon.
Abby B
It’s so popular that, yes, they built a really great facility out on Highway 90, about nine miles east of Marfa. So if you’re coming from or headed to Alpine, you’ll see it. They’re on the south side of Highway 90. It’s pretty much the only building out there. So it’s got public restrooms and a great, great place to view the lights. I was just out there with a news crew from El Paso about a month ago, and we saw some incredible things that I cannot explain. But I’ve heard stories from people that I know to be of sound mind who’ve seen some pretty wild things out at the Marfa Lights viewing station. So it’s definitely worth a stop.
Chris R
Excellent. We don’t have a ton more time, so let me jump back over to the art aspect, because this really looms large in the life of the city of Marfa and the visitor experience, certainly. And so we mentioned Donald Judd at the start. So Judd – I’ll race a little of the intro. So Judd formed a museum with the DIA foundation, as I understand it. And it’s an unusual museum because his vision was that work would be permanently installed because he didn’t like that museums would just put stuff up, take it down, put stuff up, take it down. He wanted this long term experience with the work in a specific place. So that was the first art institution, the first of many, as it turns out over time. But he didn’t know that when he founded it.
Abby B
Yeah. Judd termed himself the Father of Permanent Installation. And you’ll see when you visit, there’s two foundations in Marfa. One is the Chinati Foundation, which is the museum that was always meant to be open to the public. And it has exhibitions, permanent exhibitions by Donald Judd and 12 other artists.
Chris R
A lot of whom are also, let’s say, of equal stature in the art history sphere. You encounter several of them if you take an intro college art survey.
Abby B
And these are, yeah, they are absolutely well known. Largely, you can call them minimalist, but they’re really… It’s about experience inside of the exhibitions. And what’s amazing about them, too, is they’re permanent and they’re large scale. So this is cited on the Fort, in part of what was the Fort, Fort D. A. Russell, in some of the barracks. And there’s this great story. Donald Judd’s one of his best friends was another artist named Dan Flaven. Dan Flaven works in fluorescent light. So Judd invited Flaven out to the Fort, and he said, Okay, well, pick your building. And Flaven chose six. So when you think about it, the gift of permanence and the gift of space to another artist, that’s a really big deal. So these are artworks that will be preserved into perpetuity. They’ll always be in the same place. They’ll always be on view for the public. So that’s a really incredible thing.
Chris R
It really is. Now, one thing for people going to visit, a couple of things I want to point out that sometimes people are surprised. You can’t just walk through. There are some outdoor concrete sculptures that you can generally access, but these things are guided tour-based experiences, so that you’ll go to the visitor center. If the museum’s open, you’ll find out the schedule. So when you go there, don’t expect that you can just jump out of the car and walk like a normal museum would. The other thing I want to bring up just briefly that it holds really true for Chinati, but also extends to a lot of the… Because Chinati set the tone in a lot of ways for the kinds of work that are going to gravitate to Marfa. So when we say minimalist, so these things are not pictures of things. A lot of times when people think about art, they think of sculptures of a thing. It’s an object in the that’s being represented or a painting of a person or a landscape or something like that. And so people expect to interact with something this way. You’re showing me a picture of or a representation of something else.
But most of this work is just itself. You’re walking in and saying, well, here are these objects. The experience of being in the room with these objects is the experience of the work. So that sometimes is a surprise to folks who’ve never interacted with things like this before. What now?
Abby B
Right. Yeah. I actually worked at Chinati for several years when I first moved to Marfa. And people would often come to me and ask, “Okay, so what does it mean? What is the meaning behind this work?” And I mean, the answer is, What does it mean to you? Which I think is off-putting to some people.
Chris R
Which is a therapist cliché, right?
Abby B
Yeah, it is. I mean, that’s modern art for you. But yeah, it’s what’s the meaning of life? We don’t know. But here we are and we’re experiencing it. So sometimes it’s just about the experience. It’s just about what you’re seeing and nothing more.
Chris R
I often think of it as work that you have to meet it halfway. You have to do your share of the work. Whereas a lot of – what folks are – you go to a movie and it’s bringing you the whole experience. You just sit back and watch what it is in most genre films and things like that. Of course, there’s the art movies that you got to do a little more work. And so there’s a little more of a lift that you have to bring yourself to this thing and experience that.
Abby B
I always encourage people, though, you’re not missing anything. You know what I mean? You’re not looking at it. It’s not that you don’t get it. It’s just that there’s nothing that you need to get. Everything that you need to bring to it is already there within you. What do you see? What does it make you think of? How does it make you feel? All of the answers are within you, so you don’t have to know anything. There’s nothing that you –
Chris R
And it’s not a test that you’re failing.
Abby B
Exactly.
Chris R
Nobody is hiding around the corner laughing at you at all.
Abby B
Exactly. Yeah. And I think that that’s what some people are a little afraid of in Marfa, is that they’re missing something. But you’re not. Sometimes there’s just, sometimes the restaurants are closed. And sometimes there’s not a wild party that you’re not invited to. It’s just a quiet night. It’s just there’s either something, something or there’s not.
Chris R
Yeah. Well, and speaking of things being closed, I guess we would recommend, there’s a lot of cultural experiences available in Marfa. And I would add world-class cultural experiences for a town of this size, situated in kind of this place. It’s truly extraordinary, the things that are happening in Marfa. But it’s worth doing the research before you go, because there may be eight galleries. I’m just making that up. And the Ballroom, which is another large nonprofit institution with its own, I call it a museum structure in the middle of town in addition to Chinati. All these experiences are available, but you got to, when are they open? Look it up. So that you’re ready. You know which of them you want to see when you go, and you know when they’re open. Because otherwise, that’s probably the biggest source of unhappiness, probably for folks coming to Marfa, is that they didn’t. They just showed up, and they showed up at the wrong time, and there wasn’t anything at that time.
Abby B
Yeah. And that’s where I promote myself. Because I keep up with all this stuff – my associate Patrick and I at the Visitor Center. It’s our whole job to know when things are open. There’s no wrong time to come to Marfa, but you may miss some things that you really wanted to see and I know how disappointing that can be. So, yeah, we definitely encourage people to either visit our website or just give us a call. We really like talking to people and making sure that when you come, you can see everything you want to see. And maybe it means you come to Marfa on a particular day and then you go to Big Bend after that or vice versa.
Chris R
Right. And so I want to just point out, when you get to Marfa and you’re tempted to turn towards the courthouse on Highland, turn the other way. There you go. And go a couple of blocks and you’ll see the old USO building. Abby and Patrick are there to help get your bearings.
Abby B
Absolutely.
Chris R
So I wish we had time to talk about the great food, the amazing boutiques and shops that have just taken, you know sprouted all up and down Highland. The shopping, browsing experience is amazing there. There’s so much more to Marfa than just these few things we’ve been able to talk about. But I think we’ve taken more time than the radio usually gives us. So we probably got to move on.
Abby B
I guess we’ll just have to come back, Chris.
Chris R
Well, you’re very, very welcome, to. Thanks so much, Abby, for talking to me today.
Abby B
Thank you, Chris.
Chris R
Thank you all for listening to our show and our podcast. You can get more information about Heart of the Big Bend at visitalpinetx.com/podcast or search for Heart of the Big Bend on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast apps. And for all of you guys, listening to us on KALP/KVLF radio in Alpine, we’ll see you in two Fridays.
Outro
You’ve been listening to the heart of the Big Bend. Hope you liked what you heard and that you’ll find the time to experience all that the Big Ben has to offer. See you soon, partner.