More Than a Museum: The Chinati Foundation, Home of the Brave

Abstract

No one ever told me how to find Casa de los Valientes (1994; fig. 1). I first stumbled on the outdoor installation, also referred to as “The Wall,” in 2015 after I was brought on as a development intern at the Chinati Foundation. Once my office work was finished each day at 5 p.m., I was allowed to roam the museum grounds at will, and that is how I eventually found the work. Chinati is a sprawling campus that includes thirty-four historical buildings, most of which are located at the southern city limits of Marfa, Texas. A wire fence marks the perimeter of Chinati’s 340-acre property, where the museum’s founder, the artist Donald Judd (1928–1994), transformed a defunct military base into a contemporary art museum. Alongside site-specific installations, eight apartment buildings house employees, visiting artists, and interns. A dirt maintenance road connects the entrance of the museum to the rest of the grounds, and at a certain point, it becomes off-limits to visitors (fig. 2). But if you venture “off map” and follow the road south as far as it will go, you will find an isolated brick wall on a slightly elevated hill. Only fifty-eight feet across, this wall is easily traversed and seems redundant when compared to the barbed-wire fence only twenty feet beyond.1 You might start to wonder: if this is a work of art, why is it so hard to find, and why is it absent from official maps of the collection?