The programs involved absolutely no pipe cleaners or Popsicle sticks, and no finger painting. With close assistance from adults, kids used real equipment for detail-oriented and highly skilled activities such as machine sewing and beat mixing. My prediction for next year: welding and pedal-steel guitar.
Chinati Foundation’s Summer Art Classes
In June, more than 50 kids from preschool through junior high attended classes four days a week for three weeks at the former Marfa Ice Plant—a cavernous studio and exhibition space usually reserved for Chinati artists in residence. Local artists and designers taught a curriculum focused on a different project and skill-set each week and culminating in an exhibition tying together the three weeks of lessons.
Local artist and educator Michael Roch designed the curriculum along with Chinati Foundation Education and Public Program Coordinator Ann Marie Nafziger. On a basic level, the two managed to distill Donald Judd’s ideas for Chinati’s permanent installations in a children’s summer program—they provided the young artists with a structure to respond to creatively.
The classes began with trips to Chinati’s John Chamberlain installation and the Judd Foundation’s La Mansana de Chinati/The Block (Judd’s former residence) so the instructors and students could talk about how art, architecture and objects such as furniture work together to create a space, themes that were explored throughout the entire program.
The first week of class students created animated films that were played on old-fashioned movie projectors.
Week 1: Animation
Local filmmakers David Hollander and Jennifer Lane taught an animation workshop. Students drew on film strips to create colorful, animated abstractions and then learned how to splice the film together to create one long, continuous loop to be run through old-fashioned projectors.
Skills: Drawing and basic film editing
Students filled buckets with cement to create concrete furniture.
Week 2: Furniture
Long-time Chinati summer art class instructor Michael Roch and volunteer Susan Simmons Reinhardt helped children craft furnishings out of unexpected materials. Kids transformed old encyclopedias (probably the only time they’ve ever used an encyclopedia for anything) and hardback books donated by the Marfa Public Library into chairs. The kids turned wooden palettes into beds, and upside-down buckets of hardened concrete became coffee tables with unusual, organic forms. Kids machine-sewed pillows and added hand-stitched appliqués.
Skills: Sewing, learning what an encyclopedia is good for post-internet
Week 3: Architecture
In the final week of the class, Roch, along with local architect Peter Stanley, discussed concepts like light and space as the kids designed and built structures to serve as movie theaters for the animations they created the first week. The children also made architectural models to further explore their ideas.
Skills: Architectural design, construction
At the closing exhibition, visitors munched on popcorn and sipped lemonade as they lounged on furniture made by students. The animated films created the first week of class were projected in movie theaters designed and built by the students.
The Chinati Foundation summer art class exhibition featured furniture and movie theaters designed and built by students. Photo by Rachel Hillery.
Photo by Rachel Hillery.
Ballroom Marfa’s DJ Summer Camp
From July 19 through 23, Ballroom Marfa brought Austin-based DJ Bigface (real name Javier Arrendondo) to Marfa to teach a weeklong, intensive DJ camp attended by 11 students ranging in age from 6 to 16. Bigface began with history lessons on hip-hop culture and technical explanations of the DJ equipment. After a week of hands-on experimenting under the Bigface’s tutelage, the kids were mixing, scratching and sampling on their own. The class culminated in a showcase where the students showed off their DJ-ing and dancing skills for friends, family and members of the Marfa community.
Bigface teaches a student the basics of DJ-ing during Ballroom Marfa's DJ camp.
Although Ballroom Marfa is primarily noted for its visual art exhibitions, it’s a multidisciplinary cultural arts space with music, film and visual arts programming. With its music focus, Ballroom Marfa’s summer camp complemented long-established visual arts summer programs at the Chinati Foundation and Marfa Studio of Arts. And Ballroom created a program that undeniably appealed to junior and senior high students.
Students check out the turntables during Ballroom Marfa's DJ camp.
“We felt like this would be a great way to engage students of all musical backgrounds and to reach out to teenagers,” says J.D. DiFabbio, Ballroom’s director of development, who oversees the organization’s education programming.
It worked. One student decided to invest in his own DJ equipment, and the high schoolers were invited to perform at the Marfa Lights Festival this weekend. (Unfortunately, the scheduled performance time conflicts with the Marfa High School Shorthorns football game, so the DJs may not be performing after all.) Ballroom plans to hold another DJ camp next summer.
The younger students had a blast dancing during the DJ showcase at the end of the camp.
The high school students were too cool to dance.
Disclosure: I am an intern at the Chinati Foundation (hence the blog title). Although I didn't help out with Chinati's summer art classes, I did attend Ballroom's one-night-only DJ class for adults. My DJ name is Grandmaster Trainwreck.
Like so many I know, whenever I find myself in a foreign land, another state, or even another neighborhood, I get that Golly, wouldn’t it be neat to live here syndrome. It’s annoying, and at this point in my life I’m not even fooling myself. I know I’ll die and rot in this very spot in Houston, Texas, and no one will come and get me and my dog will pick my bones until someone rescues her. That last thought comforts me somehow.
But something far more irritating always eclipses the wouldn’t it be neat to live here, and it’s this: The Golly, wouldn’t I be a better person if I were just doing (or not doing) X?This has been going on for years, of course. In the ‘80’s I decided to lose that gas guzzling menace I drove and ride my bike everywhere. I was hit by a car. Twice. In the early ‘90s I felt compelled, after reading some environmentally-geared article, to put a compost pile in my back yard. It was soon overrun by opossums and raccoons, and I couldn’t get my dogs to stop dragging grapefruit rinds and moldy potato skins into the house.
The thing that chafes most about this syndrome is that there’s always some truth to the notion that I might be making my life better (and possibly another’s) by thinking outside my little box. No one wants to be confronted with the fact that, despite all efforts, one could be terribly amiss in some area of life or other.So this Wednesday morning I was terrified and disturbed by an article in The New York Times online edition Technology section entitledYour Brain on Computers: Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime.
One never knows when that lightning bolt of fear and guilt is going to strike, so I wasn’t prepared for the undeniable evidence that my own brain was rapidly deteriorating into a bowl of ramen.
After describing several people who spend every moment surfing, texting, talking on the phone, tweeting, etc., the author, Matt Richtel, concludes: The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.
I was addled. I’ve known for ages that I ought to unglue my eyes from my computer screen, but my fears worsened when I followed a link I’d previously ignored on August 15, 2010:
Your Brain on Computers: The Unplugged Challenge -- a collection of eleven videos made by people, ranging from late teens to early fifties, who volunteered to “give up technology” for a period of time and talk about their experiences.
I say “give up technology” because it apparently meant different things to different people. One woman (Jenn Monroe, 40, of Manchester, NH) was pretty hard core. Describing her return to technology (after no cell phone, internet, Ipod, computer, etc.), she admitted that she was having trouble even approaching the microwave. I’m surprised this woman didn’t write with a quill pen by candlelight.
Ashton Zyer, 31, of Newbury Park, CA, on the other hand, was totally suffering from turning off her cell phone during a six-hour road trip. Many of the volunteers commented on how freed-up their minds were without all of this techno-clutter. I guess Ashton couldn’t go that far: she had the car stereo on full blast as she “Jones-ed” for her cell phone down the freeway. It’s probably better that she didn’t eliminate all distracting noise entirely. I hate to imagine what dry, dusty, tumbleweedy thoughts would be sweeping through that noggin.
Of course, watching all of these brave volunteers filled me with envy and a wistful hope. I’m certainly tired of checking stupid emails every five minutes, and I’m aware that I literally walk through nearly all of my waking life chattering into a Bluetooth device, looking like a well-dressed lunatic to people who can’t see that I’m on the phone. And I watch enough television to consider the cast of Jersey Shore close, personal friends.
Could I take the “Unplugged Challenge”? If I did, what would that mean to me? Would I go commando like Ms. Monroe? Or would I find, like John Stark, 46, of Danville, CA, that my friends could still get messages to me without actually calling my phone? How would the standards be set?
I thought about it.
The Author, Each Night at Bedtime
1) First to go, of course, would be the cell phone. Who do I talk to on the phone, anyway? Am I an executive for BP? Did I really need the thing? At first I thought not. But then I noticed that many of the New York Times volunteers, like Aura Lopez, 28, of Mexico City, had phones at work. Or they had land lines. I don’t have a land line, and I work at home. I would feel awfully cut off from civilization.
I decided not to lose the phone.
To make up for that weakness, I decided that if someone did call, I would just remedy the problem by hanging up on him or her immediately. Sorry if that happens to any of you. One has to make rules and stick with them.
But then I remembered why I use my Ipod on a daily basis: to escape the even more offensive media blitz at my gym. Every morning I mount the dreaded elliptical trainer. Every morning I smooth my outdated copy of The New Yorker over the “dashboard” of the machine, so I won’t have to look at all of the LED bells and whistles that tell me how many calories I’m burning or how fast my heart is pumping, because I really don’t care.
I also have my trusty New Yorker before me so I will not look up at the wall of television sets and see how each and every one of them is programmed to Fox news.
Then I put my earbuds in place and crank my Ipod to a mind-numbing and eardrum-splitting level. This is so that I will not have to listen to the revolting dreck that streams endlessly through the gym’s sound system.
Despite my best efforts, I’m can’t totally blot out All The Single Ladies.
My Ipod was my shelter from a much greater evil. I think anyone who remembers riding the subway pre-personal stereo system will readily agree.Sure, you’re tuning out a lot of the world with that Ipod.But a lot of that world really ought to be tuned out.
I swiftly decided that, if only as a sanity-maintaining defense mechanism, the IPod would have to stay.
3) I thought that TV could probably go, program quality being what it is.
Snooki, I'll Miss You the Most
4) But then there was the internet. Ah, the internet! How would I do without that? The mere thought of it struck me with fear. As I perform what few tasks I have before me, I need constant distraction. Getting up and walking around seems out of the question, so I fill up tons of time with surfing.
All the volunteers for Challenge claimed that dispensing with technology freed up a lot of time. This might be counterintuitive in my case. I don’t need more time. I don’t need to be surfing, either. I just need more to do…
And when I thought about surfing and going to the gym, my thoughts strayed to the problem of the modern metrosexual. When I meet some dude at the gym sporting some stylishly applied product and I can’t figure out whether he’s admiring my physique or my fashionable Spandex togs, I can check out his gender preferences on a variety of personal networking sites. Online, they’ve all filled out their forms! My work’s done. You have no idea how much embarrassment this has saved me…
I decided that the internet wasn’t going to go, either.
I realized that I was too much of a wuss to really take the Challenge. This made me feel bad. How would I ever prove to myself and the world that I didn’t need, and could live without, technology when I couldn’t even bring myself to pull the plug?
But then I remembered that I’d watched all of the videos for the Unplugged Challenge online. I’d read Matt Richtel’s article on the hazards of online brain-rot—yes, you guessed it—online.I typed this article with a computer and it’ll be posted, duh, online.
Was there no way to prove that I was tough? That I could communicate the old fashioned way and actually speak to an actual person across the dinner table? That my life was more 3D than 2D?
Then I remembered that time. A lot of people around Houston probably remember it? That phenomenon which blew a lot of stuff around and ruined a lot of perfectly good property? Ah, Hurricane Ike! What a party that was. No cell phone, no air conditioning, no electricity, no unspoiled dairy products!
Gulf Coast, Unplugged
Why, we all took the Unplugged Challenge—and depending on the part of town, some of us took it for weeks on end. Rather than feeling the burn of a simple inconvenience—an inability to text or catch up on Facebook—we felt more like characters from Cormac McCarthy ’s The Road.
Average Houstonians, Post-Ike
The New York Times Unplugged Challenge volunteers all agreed that they had more time to spend constructively when they didn’t spend all their time suckling at the teat of technology. But after living without a/c for days on end, I think I’d rather scold myself for staring at a computer screen all day than sweat like a pig and stare at a moldering wall.
Of course, the internet’s a time-suck. Nobody’s arguing that. I’m sure many an employer would rather that people be working industriously than slacking and surfing. But face it: we’re all going to find a way to slack off, with or without the net. It’s true that spending large chunks of time in front of an electronic screen can’t be good for you, but when I recall my parents’ generation (think Mad Men), surfing might be healthier than that daily pack and a half of Pall Malls.
Killing Time & Themselves The Old-Fashioned Way
Something’s gotta get you through that boring-ass job…
So, for once, I don’t feel so bad. I’ve rationalized away that Unplugged Challenge! And I won’t even let myself go to that dark place where I’m thinking, Golly, wouldn’t I better person if I weren’t brain dead?
Mona Garcia is exactly what non-Texans expect a Texan to be. A native Houstonian, she comes from oil and ranching families. She’s polite, but unafraid to speak her mind. And Mona’s a bona fide raconteur.
Despite all of her Texan eccentricities (Texantricities?), for 37 of her 73 years Mona lived outside the United States. I met her recently in her office at Building 98, the former Fort D.A. Russell’s officers’ quarters and club, and the current home of the International Woman’s Foundation, which Mona founded in 2002.
“It’s called the International Woman’s Foundation because I am an international woman,” Mona explained early on in the course of our conversation. We sat on either end of an antique couch she inherited from her grandmother, across from a heavy wooden desk hand-carved for her from Amazonian cedar. Mona is an interior designer; she has decorated houses on four continents.
Mona furnished Building 98 with antiques from her parents' ranch house.
Mona first had the idea for creating a haven for female artists while living in Peru with her husband and children in the mid-1970s. Then 37, she watched as two of her friends—both female artists—died after circumstances left them without financial support and family stability.
Nearly three decades later, with financial assistance from her mother (whom Mona describes as a Baptist, feminist, Democrat and teacher), Mona purchased Building 98 and began renovating it to serve as IWF headquarters. Today, the foundation, whose mission is to enhance the intellectual, spiritual and physical lives of women in the arts, hosts artists in residence ages 40 and older, and holds art exhibitions, concerts and performances.
Mona works tirelessly to expand IWF offerings. During our conversation, she outlined the menu for a future café (roasted chicken, pommes frites, crepes Suzette), and the IWF website details long-term plans for a spa and health center. (Yoga and ballet classes are now held weekly in the building’s newly renovated L-shaped ballroom.) She’s organizing a benefit concert featuring Texas State Musician Sara Hickman to support the cost of building a meditation labyrinth on the grounds of Building 98. Mona explains that the garden will be modeled after the labyrinth at Chartes Cathedral, and will include purple sage, rosemary and thyme with a gray stone path and be open to the public.
Mona moved to Marfa 14 years ago with her husband, Rodolfo Garcia Salazar y Ledezma (Rudy for short). (He’s of French and Basque origin, Mona explains.) “This was the most foreign place we could live and still be in the U.S.A.,” she says. The old-timey feel of the town also attracted the couple; Mona describes Marfa as being “like things were 50 years ago.”
Although the Garcias planned to settle down for retirement in Marfa, an elderly man named J. A. Roosevelt distracted Mona from those plans. Roosevelt moved to Marfa in 1937 after his family (the same Roosevelt line as Franklin Delano, Mona explained) sent him west to find new ranch land.
J. A. Roosevelt
Mona keeps a black-and-white photograph of Roosevelt in a clear plastic frame on her office bookshelf. She had me take the photo down for a closer look. “He was a man’s man,” Mona says. Born in Long Island and educated at Yale, the man in the photograph looked more like a cowboy than a gentleman from the East Coast. Roosevelt decided to stay in Marfa and made the former officers’ quarters his home at some point after Fort D.A. Russell closed in 1946.
In 1999, Roosevelt approached Mona about buying the building, which she did in 2001. It was important for him to find a buyer who was interested in art and in the area’s military history. Two of the rooms in Building 98 are covered in World War II-era frescoes painted by German prisoners of war captured in North Africa. Thanks to the dry climate of the Big Bend region, these murals remain in good condition, with the exception of some peeling due to water damage caused by a leaky roof.
German scene in the gala dining room
Texas scene in the gala dining room
Since purchasing Building 98, Mona has done her best to preserve the murals. She raised $1.25 million in renovation funds, which allowed her to replace the roof to prevent further water damage. She’s applying for grants to help add climate control and to support the cost of hiring conservators to stabilize the murals.
The murals in the gala dining room, which would have seated 40 to 50 guests, depict landscapes of the Big Bend region and Germany as viewed through Medieval cloister-style columns. Separate panels show scenes of a stag standing in a green field, a small village nestled in between mountains and a lake, and contrasted by paintings of yellow grass, yuccas and cactuses. The adjoining room, Roosevelt’s former library, is covered with western scenes: a chuckwagon dinner, cowboys branding a calf, and a ranch house.
A depiction of branding on the wall of the former library
A chuckwagon scene on the wall of the former library
September 10-15, the IWF hosts an exhibition featuring artwork by Julian Press, the son of Hans-Jürgen Press, one of the two soldiers who painted the murals. (Robert Hampel was the other muralist.) After returning to Germany following World War II, the elder Press enjoyed a successful career as an illustrator. Also on display will be the work of Johannes Wunner and Sallie McIlheran.
An installation of work by Mona’s son Gregorio Garcia Von Blucher
Other upcoming events include the Sara Hickman concert and an exhibition of work by Mona’s son Gregorio Garcia Von Blucher, who died earlier this year. Charles Peveto of the Texas Historical Commission curates the show, which opens November 26.
Mona says when she first purchased Building 98, locals doubted her commitment to the project. “When I first started, people were like, ‘Mona Garcia, she’s just dabbling.’” But nine years and $1.25 million later, Mona is still working to strengthen the IWF programming and to raise the funds necessary to preserve this unusual piece of military history.
Honig took a few minutes out of a recent busy afternoon to answer some quick questions as NBC Universal attorney Maile Marshall listened in.
No Country for Old Interns: How was watching the end product—the 10 episodes of the TV show—different from your experience making the show?
Peregrine Honig: I gave myself to Bravo, and the narrative they gave me back was really interesting. I’m really glad I did it.
Which challenge did you find the most challenging?
Having to work in groups where I don’t pick my companions. I’m really picky about who I collaborate with, so the group challenges were harder.
There was a lot of buzz surrounding your wardrobe. Can you tell me a little bit about the clothing you wore for the show?
Mostly I wore [Kansas City designer] Peggy Noland, and I wore a couple of pieces by [fellow Kansas City designer and 2009 Project Runway participant] Ari Fish. My necklace is from Brian Haas of Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. He gave it to me as a gift. It’s from his girlfriend. My hat is from a girl in Texas: Chia Hats. She’s killer! Give her some credit so she can make some money off my head.
The finale has aired. What’s next for you?
I have a show in October at Dwight Hackett Projects that I agreed to before the show. I am really excited about that.
Add Comment (0)
