Quite a while ago, when I was learning the history of postwar art, I read about the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd and his late-career installations in Marfa, Texas. I thought to myself, "What in the world is in Marfa, Texas?"


I searched high and low for any kind of justification for his choice of this particular geography, and from everything I could gather, it seemed as though the place, located in the high desert of west Texas with a population now just over 2,000, seemed the perfect blank slate to serve as the permanent home for Judd's imposing industrial sculptures. It is in many ways the antithesis of New York City, the artist's prior residence. Satisfied with that explanation, I put Marfa out of my mind.

That is, until I came across the new photographic collective: Marfa [trip].

This group of 13 female photographers scattered throughout the United States formed online and orchestrated a collective road trip to Marfa, armed with their cameras, keen photographic eyes, and an almost tangible sense of camaraderie. The resulting images range from meditative to vibrant, kitschy to quaint, vast to minuscule; the adjectives one could exhaust describing each artist's contribution is seemingly inexhaustible.

Marfa is a distinctly remote location. The vast isolation of the desert stretches for endless miles on any side. It is a place where searing heat forms perceptible ripples rising from the asphalt, daring inhabitants to brave its midday assault. Tarantulas, snakes and formidable, spiky succulents abound, each species noteworthy for it's solitary tendencies.


And yet, the women of Marfa[trip] have chosen this geography as a place of cohesion. Rather than allowing the natural conditions to divide their perspectives, to splinter them into meditations on solitude in the face of companionship, there is an eerie, beautiful lack of individuality between each artist's way of seeing her surroundings.

I found myself asking the same questions of Marfa[trip] as I did of Donald Judd. Namely: Why there? Why now? And my conclusion is bound to the particular geography and history of the place itself.

Marfa seems, by these accounts, to be a place of contemplation, of possibility, and of liminality -- a place between individualism and community. It is also a place unbound by convention, congestion and expectation, and thereby ripe for creative picking. But, I think in the case of the Marfa[trip] contributors, it is a place of definition, interaction with the dominant past of sculpture, masculinity, and the assertion of a new kind of beauty in the finding of a shared, rather than singular, experience.

For more on Marfa [trip] please visit their website and blogs of the 13 contributors. You can also follow their thoughts and any new developments on the project via their Twitter.