Making Space With Donald Judd

In a short, indignant essay from 1977, Donald Judd made the case that museums were inadequate for their job. The ­renowned American artist felt that his work had mostly been “exhibited badly and always for short periods” in New York and elsewhere. Moreover, the endless packing, freight and installation required by the international art world’s punishing circuit of exhibitions had taken its toll on his fragile work. No longer willing to tolerate these conditions, some years earlier, Judd had decided to ­defend his craft by seeking out a different approach to its ­exhibition. As he implored, “somewhere there has to be a place where the installation is well done and permanent.”  

Achieving this would require more space than was available in New York City. And so, in 1973, Judd resettled his young family in Marfa, a small county seat in West Texas. It became Judd’s primary residence and work base for the next two ­decades, until his untimely death in 1994. As he made clear in a later essay from 1985, Marfa’s purpose was to enable “the serious and permanent installation of art,” as well as to serve as a place for “my idea of living.”  

Judd had passed through West Texas as an 18-year-old during his military service and was immediately entranced by the openness of the desert landscape. Sitting on a plain ­approximately 60 miles north of the US-Mexico border, on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, Marfa was founded in the 1880s as a water stop for steam trains on the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1911, it became home to a prominent military base that was shuttered after World War II. By 1971, Marfa was ­economically depleted and on the verge of abandonment. In this, Judd saw opportunity. As writer Barbara Purcell observes of this pivotal moment, from the moment he arrived in West ­Texas, “space would never be an issue again.”