How Does Marfa Move Forward After Donald Judd? - The New York Times

One of 100 aluminum works by Donald Judd from 1982-1986 stands in a former artillery shed in Marfa, Texas.

The Chinati Foundation is debating how to cool down buildings where the sculptures heat up to 120 degrees.Credit...Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Douglas Tuck/The Chinati Foundation.

Their custodians at the Chinati Foundation, which stewards the collection of works by Judd and a dozen major artists he invited to this remote town, must decide how best to mitigate the heat without compromising the holistic experience meticulously calibrated by Judd four decades ago.

As children, she and her brother, Flavin, accompanied their father when he started buying up vacant buildings in Marfa.

(Judd bought 22 buildings in and around Marfa as living and working spaces, now open by appointment through the Judd Foundation.).

With funding from Dia Art Foundation in 1978, Judd acquired 34 more buildings on 340 acres: Fort D.A.

In 1986, Judd established the Chinati Foundation as a curatorial forum for permanent installations and temporary projects, a kind of anti-museum where the artist was paramount.

“The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought.” In counterpoint, he invited artists including Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Richard Long, Roni Horn, David Rabinowitch, Ilya Kabakov and Ingolfur Arnarsson to place work at Chinati, where it would be preserved in perpetuity.

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, recalls visiting Marfa in the early 1990s as deputy director of the Guggenheim Museum, which had recently acquired the Panza Collection of Minimalist and Conceptual art, including works by Judd that the artist had renounced.

“Judd was a domineering person to some people,” he said, “but his principles make Marfa special — the reclaiming of America’s abandoned landscape of industrial buildings to create spaces honest and good for the art; the sense of space and light; the commitment to long-term installations to endure through cycles of taste where it’s out of favor.”.

Both foundations are carrying out long-range plans for preserving deteriorating buildings and posthumous completion of projects, with an estimated price tag of $40 million for Chinati and $30 million for the Judd Foundation.

In April, Chinati completed its first phase, a $2.7 million restoration of the 23,000-square-foot Chamberlain Building — replacing the roof, upgrading the Judd-designed pivot windows and doors, restoring Judd’s garden planted with a grid of rosette-shaped sotols and his distinctive adobe wall enclosing a courtyard.

“The completion of the Chamberlain building is a demonstration that the foundation is capable of renovating one of Judd’s buildings in an exemplary fashion,” said Nicholas Serota, a longtime Chinati trustee and a former director of the Tate in London.

The decision to look for new leadership “played along a difficult conversation that really centered around keeping the mission vital,” said Annabelle Selldorf, a prominent architect and Chinati trustee.

Weiner, who came to Marfa to work as Judd’s assistant, stayed on after his death to help Judd’s romantic partner, Marianne Stockebrand, Chinati’s first director, steer the institution from financial brink.

Weiner’s dismissal roused a slew of artists affiliated with Chinati, who signed a group letter in The Big Bend Sentinel accusing its leadership of losing touch with Judd’s founding mission.

“We can’t do that anymore,” said Moore, who sees the need to create more restrooms, greater accessibility and affordable housing on the Chinati grounds for staff priced out of gentrified Marfa.

When the artist Theaster Gates began transforming buildings on Chicago’s South Side into cultural spaces with his Rebuild Foundation, he informally called his project “Black Marfa” — influenced by Judd’s “inexhaustible ambition for what art could be,” Gates said.

At the Judd Foundation library in Marfa, Gates noticed that the sun had bleached a line across a book that no one had ever moved

Should Chinati replicate what’s been there since 1984, or achieve Judd’s expressed intention

Serota, the Chinati trustee, who thinks the closed ends may have been Judd’s temporary solution, urged caution before moving ahead