The Marfa Chronicle

I am not sure what motivated my friend Susan and me to choose Marfa, TX, as the destination for a midweek fall mini-vacation, but the storied art town near the state’s southwestern border with Mexico proved a seductive mecca for an artist and an art journalist. Some may know it as the setting for Chris Kraus’s brash epistolary novel I Love Dick, and the Amazon Prime series of the same name (wherein one character describes it as “a small quirky place . . . a combination of blue-collar desert town and folksy artistic retreat”). For art lovers, though, it is the town that Donald Judd made famous between 1971 and his death in 1994, buying up some 32,000 acres of nearby real estate and converting numerous buildings into enormous galleries both for his work and for the art of a select few of his contemporaries, like John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin.