Richard Maxwell

During his residency, playwright and theater director Richard Maxwell prepared a space in a currently unoccupied portion of Chinati’s Ice Plant building for the making of his performance work Ads, which was presented over the course of  Chinati Weekend in October 2018. Ads featured approximately thirty members of the local community, who shared deeply held beliefs that became the text and subject of the work. In August 2018 Maxwell also directed a production of his musical theater work Ode to the Man Who Kneels, staged on the slab of an old fort building on the Chinati Foundation grounds. The work featured a cast of local actors and musicians as well as Maxwell’s long-time collaborators Jim Fletcher and Tory Vasquez.

Richard Maxwell is a playwright, director, and the artistic director of New York City Players. He was a Doris Duke Performing Artist and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, and was an invited artist in the Whitney Biennial. In 2018, his play Paradiso premiered at Greene Naftali Gallery and was presented at Nanterre-Amandiers (Paris), FAB festival (Bordeaux), and Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse); his play Queens Row was presented at ICA in London in September 2018. His latest book is the first monograph on his plays, The Theater Years, published by Greene Naftali and Westreich Wagner (2017). Other publications include Theater for Beginners (2015), and Plays, 1999–2000 (2004) published by TCG.