Marfa, Texas, is a world-renowned art pilgrimage site. When Donald Judd moved there in 1971, he permanently installed works of art in and around the town. Catalyzed by Judd’s presence, the small southwestern town is now home to galleries, arts foundations, festivals, and studios. In Marfa, Marfa, Josh T Franco examines the minimalist frameworks and aesthetic paradigms Judd brought to Marfa and how they intersect with the rasquache sensibilities of the area’s Chicanx, Mexican American, and Catholic communities. Franco draws on his own family history in the town as well as Marfa’s complex history, culture, and memory, analyzing archival documents alongside the arts institutions that gave rise to the town’s identity. Marfa, Marfa employs a decolonial and experimental method to examine minimalist and Chicanx art through objects for public display, local dialects, and domestic observations, ultimately demonstrating Marfa’s unique role as a crossroads for minimalism and rasquachismo.
Praise
“Josh T Franco addresses two conceptual frameworks governing Marfa: the legacy of sculptor Donald Judd’s Minimalist work—including the Chinati foundation—and the local Mexican American, Indigenous, and Catholic communities. Key to the success of the text is its intellectual refusal to separate these discourses and aesthetic paradigms, intimately linking their creative endeavors, their systems of meaning, their modes of fabrication, and their sites of pilgrimage.” - Jennifer A. González, Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz
"In theorizing Marfa's Indigenous presence and its Chicanx creative culture alongside Donald Judd's minimalist structures, Josh T Franco has forged a new art history. This is an exhilarating and important book." - Julia Bryan-Wilson, professor of Contemporary Art at Columbia University
Available to purchase here.