Chinati Weekend 2012 Wrap Up
This year’s Chinati Weekend (October 5th– 7th) celebrated the life and work of John Chamberlain. We would like to thank everyone – our members, our many visitors, our contributing artists and musicians, and our volunteers and staff – for making it an incredible weekend.
The weekend’s program began on Friday with cocktails and live jazz at the John Chamberlain Building in downtown Marfa, followed by a special Moroccan dinner at the Arena, catered by Shelley Hudson and Food Company of Dallas.
The next day we opened our doors and collection for the entirety of the weekend, beginning with a Saturday morning champagne toast to celebrate the successful restoration of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Monument to the Last Horse by Chinati conservator Bettina Landgrebe. Curator Lynne Cooke discussed Chamberlain’s process at Barge Marfa in the Chamberlain building later that afternoon, followed by a freewheeling roundtable discussion about the artist with Larry Bell, Alexandra Fairweather, Klaus Kertess, and Ultra Violet at the neighboring Crowley Theatre. We finished the day with crisp autumn weather and a memorable revue of Marfa-made rock ‘n’ roll downtown at the shade structure, with Adam Bork, Foundation for Jammable Resources, Hotel Brotherhood, LBS, Solid Waste, and Jesse Tejada/Party With Death.
The weekend’s program resumed on Sunday morning with Chamberlain: Poetry and the Gondolas, an intimate reading co-hosted with our friends at the Marfa Book Company downtown. Several film screenings related to John Chamberlain at the Crowley Theatre were also featured that day, including John Chamberlain by Alexandra Fairweather, John Chamberlain: Modern Sculpture by Paul Tschinkel, and Chamberlain’s own The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez.
Though Chamberlain’s contributions to contemporary art remained the focus of the weekend’s events, there were, in addition to an open viewing of Chinati’s permanent collection, a number of new and special exhibitions also on view for the weekend, including John Chamberlain’s photographs and Drawings in the Manner of a Lithograph, Robert Irwin’s Cool School and the recent work of our Artist In Residence, Ester Partegas, along with selected works from the collection by Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, and Carl Andre.
As the air warmed and clouds broke for a dazzling Sunday afternoon of west Texas sunshine, a stream of visitors strolled throughout our collection, exhibitions, spaces and land, experiencing firsthand the uniqueness of far west Texas, and most of all, the Chinati Foundation.
All photos by Mary Lou Saxon.