The Marfa Invitational Foundation has announced the artists who will be included in the event’s first-ever Marfa Invitational Open, which is scheduled to open on May 15 and run through May 26 in the city’s Saint George Hall building. Artists in the exhibition were culled from a statewide call earlier this year, which was open to artists born, raised, currently living and working in, or who have received an arts degree in Texas.
Per the Invitational, the exhibition is “a monumental salon-style exhibition and survey of over 150 Texas Artists” who are at varying stages in their careers and who work in myriad mediums. The show was “selected and curated” by the Marfa Invitational Open’s Curatorial Committee, which includes art collector and author Sonia Borrell, artist and collector Lester Marks, and Michael Phelan, the founder and director of the Foundation.
Programming scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition includes the debut of new sculptures by Katarina Janecková Walshe, Jammie Holmes, Ray Smith, and Sofia Elias at the Marfa Invitational Sculpture Park on May 15; a vernissage for the show on May 16; and a “Party Under the Stars” in celebration of the show at the Sculpture Park on May 17. Events are free and open to the public. See a list of the artists included in the Marfa Invitational Open below.
The Invitational began in 2019 as an art fair that featured well-known galleries from across the U.S. It skipped 2020, and then resumed with presentations in 2021, 2022, and 2023. After the 2023 edition, news came out that the Invitational had lost its nonprofit status and that a donor to the Invitational’s nonprofit arm had filed a charitable trust complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, alleging mismanagement of funds. The Invitational’s nonprofit status was reinstated later that year, and there have been no public updates about the status of the donor’s complaint.
The 2024 edition of the event, compared to previous years, was pared-down, featuring a private viewing of the Foundation’s sculpture park, an unveiling of a new billboard-sized artwork, and artist talks and dinners. Though that year’s event also featured solo exhibitions by Jeremy Booth and Camilla Engström in the Historic Mercantile building in Valentine, Texas, just west of Marfa, it did not include multiple gallery exhibitors in the Saint George Hall space, as past iterations did.
The Invitational had initially said, via an Instagram post, that it was planning a two-week run of the fair for 2025, with one weekend featuring an international edition of the fair, and one weekend featuring a fair dedicated to local artists and galleries. That Instagram announcement was lated removed from the Invitational’s account, and subsequently the organization announced the Texas open call.
