Marfa, Texas, is a world-renowned art pilgrimage site. When Donald Judd moved there in 1971, he permanently installed works of art in and around the town. Catalyzed by Judd’s presence, the small southwestern town is now home to galleries, arts foundations, festivals, and studios. In Marfa, Marfa, Josh T Franco examines the minimalist frameworks and aesthetic paradigms Judd brought to Marfa and how they intersect with the rasquache sensibilities of the area’s Chicanx, Mexican American, and Catholic communities. Franco draws on his own family history in the town as well as Marfa’s complex history, culture, and memory, analyzing archival documents alongside the arts institutions that gave rise to the town’s identity. Marfa, Marfa employs a decolonial and experimental method to examine minimalist and Chicanx art through objects for public display, local dialects, and domestic observations, ultimately demonstrating Marfa’s unique role as a crossroads for minimalism and rasquachismo.

Josh T Franco is an independent artist and art historian.

"In theorizing Marfa's Indigenous presence and its Chicanx creative culture alongside Donald Judd's minimalist structures, Josh T Franco has forged a new art history. This is an exhilarating and important book."
-- Julia Bryan-Wilson, professor of Contemporary Art at Columbia University

List of Illustrations  ix
Invocation  xi
Introduction. Rasquachismo, Minimalism  1
1. Pilgrim, Approach  22
2. Marfa, Aztlán  57
3. Making, Aesthesis  79
Conclusion. Love, Yard (Hanging Out in Marfa)  105
Coda  143
Acknowledgments  145
Notes  153
Bibliography  171
Index  177