Tickets for April programs in Marfa are now available.
The Chinati Foundation and Rice School of Architecture are pleased to announce the participants for Part I of the forthcoming symposium Art in Context: Art, Architecture, and the Middle Landscape. Taking place in Marfa from April 4 through 6, Part I 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 the history of the buildings and their broader influence on museum architecture, the symposium will focus on current efforts to restore the structures, preserve Judd’s architectural interventions, protect the art, and care for the surrounding landscape.
This symposium is hosted collaboratively in two parts by The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati and Rice School of Architecture and co-organized by Stephen Martin, Director of Preservation and Planning at the Chinati Foundation; Caitlin Murray, Director of the Chinati Foundation; and Troy Schaum, Associate Professor at Rice School of Architecture.
The schedule of events and conversations, which will continue to expand in the coming months, is as follows.
Friday, April 4, 2025
Opening Remarks
Caitlin Murray
Keynote Lecture
Carme Pigem
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Presentation and Panel Discussion
Shantel Blakely, Erica Cooke, and Richard Shiff
Moderated by Julian Rose
Keynote Lecture
Tatiana Bilbao
Presentation and Panel Discussion
Rosetta Elkin and Fabiola López-Duran
Moderated by Maggie Tsang
Keynote Lecture
Alberto Kalach
Accompanying Events
Open Viewing of Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum
Exhibition Viewing
This exhibition will bring together archival drawings and photographs of the former artillery sheds that house Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum alongside models, drawings, and construction details of restoration possibilities.
Sunday, April 6, 2025
Conversation
Larry Bell
with Randy Kennedy
Presentation and Panel Discussion
Pat Arnett, Erik Olsen, James Parker, and Maggie Tsang
Moderated by Stephen Martin and Troy Schaum
Closing Remarks
Troy Schaum and Igor Marjanović
Landscape Walking Tour around the Artillery Sheds
Jim Martinez
PARTICIPANTS
in order of appearance
Caitlin Murray is the Director of the Chinati Foundation.
Carme Pigem is a member of the Pritzker Prize-winning architectural firm RCR Arquitectes, together with Ramón Vilalta and Rafael Aranda. Since 2005 she has been a visiting professor in the Department of Architecture at the Zurich Institute of Technology (ETHZ), Switzerland.
Shantel Blakely is an architect and architectural historian and an assistant professor at Rice School of Architecture. Her forthcoming book Appartamento Aperto: At Home with Marco Zanuso, published by MIT Press, characterizes the architect's stance on the human potential of mechanization in industrial designs and buildings.
Erica Cooke is Curator for the collection of His Excellency Sheikh Jassim Bin Abdulaziz Al-Thani and worked on the curatorial team for Judd at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 2020 retrospective dedicated to Donald Judd.
Richard Shiff is a professor and the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Chinati Foundation’s Board of Trustees. His collection of essays on Donald Judd, published by Marfa Book Co. and Hatje Cantz, appeared in 2020.
Julian Rose is a historian and critic of art and architecture and a former Senior Editor at Artforum. His latest book, Building Culture, explores the architecture of art museums and was released by Princeton Architectural Press in September 2024.
Tatiana Bilbao founded her eponymous studio in 2004 and holds a recurring teaching position at Yale School of Architecture.
Rosetta Elkin is the Principal of Practice Landscape, Academic Director of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture Master’s in Landscape Architecture (MLA) program, and an Associate of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University.
Fabiola López-Duran is an associate professor in the art history department at Rice University. Her Book, Eugenics in the Garden, published by University of Texas Press, investigates a strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, informed the process of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic.
Maggie Tsang is a landscape architect, architect, and urbanist. She is Co-Founder and Managing Principal of Dept., a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in Houston, and an assistant professor at Rice School of Architecture. Dept. is part of the design team completing ongoing studies of the landscape surrounding the Artillery Sheds at Chinati.
Alberto Kalach is an architect working in Mexico City. He is the founder of el Taller de Arquitectura X (TAX) and the architect of the José Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City.
Larry Bell has been a working artist since the late 1950s, making artwork in glass, on canvas and on paper in his Taos, New Mexico and Venice, California studios. In 2014, Chinati presented the exhibition Larry Bell: 6 x 6 An Improvisation.
Randy Kennedy is a writer, editor, and curator. He was on the staff of The New York Times for 25 years, more than half of that time writing about the art world. He is currently director of special projects for Hauser & Wirth and Editor in Chief of the gallery's magazine, Ursula.
Pat Arnett is the Principal at TYLin and has been a studio consultant for Rice School of Architecture since 2011. He is involved in ongoing structural engineering studies at Chinati, with a particular focus on the Artillery Sheds.
Erik Olsen is a Managing Partner at Transsolar KlimaEngineering, an international climate engineering firm. He leads the New York team to develop and validate low-energy, architecturally integrated climate and energy concepts for clients, and he is part of the team completing ongoing studies of the Artillery Sheds at Chinati.
James Parker is CEO of Simpson Gumpertz and Heger, an international engineering firm that advises on engineering solutions for the Artillery Sheds at Chinati.
Stephen Martin is the Director of Preservation and Planning at the Chinati Foundation.
Troy Schaum is an associate professor at Rice School of Architecture and Principal of Schaum Architects. As an architect, he is engaged in ongoing preservation and restoration work at Chinati, including ongoing studies of the Artillery Sheds and the recently completed restoration of the John Chamberlain Building.
Igor Marjanović is William Ward Watkin Dean and Professor at Rice School of Architecture.
Jim Martinez is the co-author of Marfa Garden: A Field Guide to Plants of the Chihuahuan Desert, published in 2024, and serves as the president of the Board of Directors of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute. As a landscape designer and soil scientist, he supports ongoing land restoration efforts at Chinati.
Full schedule forthcoming. For updates and more information, visit chinati.org.
Tickets for Part I are now available. Seating is limited, and advanced registration is required.
Part II (Houston, November 14–15, 2025) will expand these conversations to address urgent challenges in contemporary art and architectural practice. Through panels and discussions, participants will examine the tensions between environmental conservation and the preservation of cultural artifacts, proposing future strategies for sites of ecological vulnerability and historical significance. The symposium will coincide with an exhibition, presented as part of Exhibitions at Rice, on view in the Hines Family Gallery and the Casbarian-Appel Gallery within William T. Cannady Hall at the Rice School of Architecture from September 4 through December 2, 2025.
Generous support has been provided by Lee and Mike Cohn and Lori and Alexandre Chemla.
About The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati
In 1986, Donald Judd (1928–1994) established The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati with the aim of bringing art, architecture, and land together to form a coherent whole. Judd imagined Chinati, which is located on a 340-acre former military base in Marfa, Texas, as a site where artists could situate work according to their own intentions, permanently. Today, Chinati carefully maintains artists’ installations as they were conceived and presents them to a broad public. With rotating exhibitions, artist residencies, educational activities, and public programs, Chinati is a place where art—both the creation and viewing of it—is a part of daily life.
About Rice School of Architecture
The Rice School of Architecture is an international center of design research, experimentation, and debate that engages and reconstructs our world in the most imaginative and holistic ways. Thirty-four faculty and twelve staff offer our 131 undergraduate and sixty-two graduate students a personalized learning experience. We educate the next generation of architects to stand at the forefront of our discipline and to embody the dual role of public intellectual and agile practitioner as they design for a world in flux.