Symposium: Art in Context

“Art in Context: Art, Architecture, and the Middle Landscape” is the latest in a series of symposia presented by The Chinati Foundation. Since 1995, Chinati has organized six symposia—each one focused on a particular aspect of the museum’s mission or collection and documented in an accompanying publication that includes essays and edited transcriptions of conversations.

Part I (Marfa, April 4–7, 2025) will explore the relationship between art, architecture, and land at Chinati by focusing on one of the most significant examples of their integration: the former artillery sheds that house Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum. Considering both the history of the buildings and their broader influence on museum architecture, part I will focus on current efforts to restore the structures, preserve Judd’s architectural interventions, protect the art, and care for the surrounding landscape.

Part II (Houston, November 14–15, 2025) will draw on contemporary art and architecture practices to foster conversations about the sometimes-competing priorities of environmental and art conservation. Participants will discuss potential futures for sites of arrested decay and ecological precarity. An accompanying exhibition will be staged in the new Rice University Architecture Gallery, September 4, 2025 through December 2, 2025.

Judd considered the specific legacies of a place that is neither urban nor rural—a type of environment that American cultural historian and literary critic Leo Marx termed “the middle landscape.” Judd’s work at Chinati invokes multiple understandings of historicity, frames the sites of work in relationship to their earliest uses, and provides opportunities for artists to determine the installation of their art within this context.

“Art in Context: Art, Architecture, and the Middle Landscape” will investigate art and architecture practices in socially, politically, and ecologically turbulent times, while imagining productive and sustainable futures of maintenance and repair, adaptive reuse, and environmental conservation.

Speakers and panelists will be announced in the coming months.

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