Judd Foundation renovating Marfa buildings
Donald Judd entered the pantheon of minimalist art for works like his “Judd boxes,” deceptively simple containers that stand on the floor or get stacked on walls.
This fall, the Judd Foundation has started shoring up the walls themselves, specifically the cluster of buildings it owns in and around Marfa, Texas, where the artist lived and worked starting in the 1970s.
Led by his children, Rainer and Flavin Judd, the foundation has embarked on a several-year project that will eventually involve renovating six of its structures, out of the 21 total it owns in the area, to fulfill plans the artist wasn’t able to complete in his lifetime.
It will add 26,500 square feet of new program space and make open to the public for the first time another 16,000 square feet. (The project doesn’t affect the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, the museum Judd founded, which features his own work as well as that of other artists.)
The first phase, which costs about $2 million, is already underway, and so is the fundraising. It will rehab two buildings, the Architecture Office and part of the compound known as the Block. In the Architecture Office building, slated to be completed in 2020, visitors will now be able to see Judd’s architectural models and drawings, furniture and other design objects.
Judd had a passion for architecture, once saying: “The space surrounding my work is crucial to it: As much thought has gone into the installation as into a piece itself.”
Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, noted that because of that precision, “many of his biggest fans are actually architects.”
Flavin Judd said that he and his sister committed to the plan because Marfa “is one of the only places where you can see Don’s work as it was meant to be seen.”
“A work by itself in a museum is just not the same,” he added.
That Marfa is becoming a destination might have been amusing to the artist. “When Judd lived in Marfa, he already thought it was too crowded,” Temkin said. “He kept buying ranches to get further and further away.”