As summer wound down in 2001, the artist Fairfax Dorn was feeling done with New York City. Then the Twin Towers crumbled, and Dorn set her sights southward to her native Texas. A few months later, she and her collaborator, the writer Virginia Lebermann, settled in Terlingua, a dusty town (population 249) near Big Bend National Park.

In their rental casita, they contended with scorpions and watched travelers arrive for the village’s infamous chili cook-off. Dorn painted the vast Texas horizon. Then one day they headed to the Crowley Theater, two hours away in Marfa, for a reading. Once a bus stop, repair shop, gallery, and dance hall, the building sparked an idea, one in sync with Marfa’s remote-art-world allure, thanks to Donald Judd. The place could be an arts center! In 2003, Ballroom Marfa was born.

For Ballroom’s first exhibition series, the Colombian artist Maria Jose Arjona drew starlike symbols in charcoal on the gallery walls. Later, Dorn and Lebermann invited the American dealer Alexander Gray to curate their first group show. When the feminist artist Agnes Denes visited, she created a sculpture addressing the local water crisis. The experience was very much no frills. Visiting artists stayed at the newly reopened Hotel Paisano and dined at one of Marfa’s three restaurants.

Today, the town is perhaps best known for Prada Marfa, the permanent public-art project by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, located a few miles from Ballroom Marfa. Installed in October 2005, the “boutique” displays items from Prada’s 2005 fall collection, but it’s never open for business; the door stays locked.

“We thought, what is the high-fashion industry?,” Ingar Dragset said in an interview. “What does it look like if you take it out of its normal environment?”

By now, many artists have come through Ballroom’s doors, including Isa Genzken, Huma Bhabha, Carol Bove, and Takashi Murakami. The book Ballroom Marfa: The First Twenty Years tells the story of this remarkable institution through the voices of those who shaped it—artists, curators, musicians, and the local community.

“The Chihuahuan desert,” Lebermann writes, “felt like liberation and an anchor. An anchor to a grittier substance. We would circumnavigate the globe by bringing the world to the desert.” —Elena Clavarino

Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL

Photos: courtesy of Rashid Johnson and Hauser & Wirth/Photo: Fredrik Nilsen (Shea Butter Irrigation System); courtesy of Haroon Mirza, Lisson Gallery, and Ballroom Marfa/Photo: Rowdy Lee Dugan (Stone Circle); courtesy of Fernando Palma Rodríguez, François Ghebaly, and Ballroom Marfa/Photo: Alex Marks (On the Back of Syphilis Mountain Candelilla Grows); © 2003 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., all rights reserved/Photo: George O. Jackson (Jellyfish Eyes, Black); © Sigalit Landau (DeadSee); courtesy of Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, Alexandre Singh, and Andrew Krepps Gallery/Photo: Tom Jenkins (Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, both); courtesy of Solange Pessoa, Ballroom Marfa, Mendes Wood DM, and Blum & Poe/Photo: Alex Marks (Untitled); courtesy of Kelly Nipper and Ballroom Marfa (Weather Center, both); Makenzie Goodman (Invocation for a Wandering Lake: Part 1 & 2); Photo: Jennifer Boomer (The Marfa Triptych: The Desert); courtesy of Roger Hiorns and Corvi–Mora, London/Photo: Thierry Bal (A Retrospective View of the Pathway); courtesy of Elmgreen & Dragset, Art Production Fund, and Ballroom Marfa/Photo: James Evans (Prada Marfa); courtesy of Maria Hassabi and Ballroom Marfa (Gloria); Alex Marks (DJ Camp); courtesy of Guadalupe Maravilla, PPOW Gallery, New York, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston/Photo: Makenzie Goodman (Mariposa Relámpago)