Welcome To Marfa, Texas: Hipster Paradise

Deurbanization is everywhere these days. The cool kids move to Brooklyn. Brooklyn gets lame and they move to Detroit. Or Omaha. Or, in extreme cases, to the most desolate place on earth, Downtown Los Angeles.

Contemporary culture is obsessed with finding that cool, unexplored or abandoned gem that’s still authentic. Every hipster dreams of being the first bold colonist in that neighborhood of abandoned factories. Unfortunately, most people are posers, and they settle for a Girls-like existence in a community of white people in an area of a city that used to be “like, so ghetto.”

However, those that move to West Texas are kind of the real deal.

In 1971, minimalist artist Donald Judd rented a house in Marfa, Texas “as an antidote to the New York art world.” He chose Marfa because it was where the 1956 epic Giant, starring James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor, was filmed. The house he rented eventually turned into a studio and that studio into a compound of minimalist art pieces laid out on the empty landscape like boulders on a plain. This compound, called the Chinati Foundation, became a fly-trap for artists frustrated with the scenes of various big cities throughout United States. And so they began to trickle into Marfa. Forty years later, it’s become a tiny hipster heaven of edgy galleries, food trucks and weird music.

Hollywood, normally behind the curve, has taken early notice. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were filmed during the same summer in Marfa. The story goes that the Coen brothers lost two days of filming because of the plumes of black smoke wafting from P.T. Anderson’s set.

Marfa is populated by irreverent artists and other deurbanizers—those who love the smell of authenticity that hangs thick in the air. On a roadtrip from New Orleans to LA, I stopped by Marfa. Here is what I saw.

Photography by Isaac Simpson and Adam Solomon.

Isaac Simpson is a writer and producer living in Los Angeles. You can follow him on Twitter here.

West Texas is the most remote place in the continental United States, with only 8 inhabitants per square mile. It’s where Friday Night Lights is set, to give you an idea what kind of people live there. In other words, if there were high school football rivalries on the Moon, it would look like West Texas.

Marfa is about two hours off the major interstate, an insanely straight stretch of highway where I kept the car at a steady 120 mph. When we rolled into the dust-caked, rusty-bunker of a town, we found it empty. Two beautiful bandanna clad art-girls on bikes rode out of the dust.

We asked where we might "rustle up some grub ‘round here." They directed us to bar where we walked in on the middle of a gospel show, attended by young art-types—beards and glasses and plaid—as well as older looking authentic Texans.

After consuming the best chiliburger I’ve ever eaten at the Gospel bar, we explored the town. It’s tiny, takes about ten minutes to walk from one end to the other and must have more art galleries per capita than any other place on earth. Inside one of the galleries was a room where you sit in timeout while a man speaks in what sounded like Japanese.

The Chinati Foundation, the crown jewel of the Marfa Art Scene, is not open to the general public. Rather, you have to catch one of two daily tours. We took the 3 o’clock. We were joined by a Brazilian chick band, in town from Rio to play a gig that night.

Here is the Chinati Foundation, which, as you can see, is basically giant hunks of concrete sittin' on the plain.

Prada Marfa, an art installation you have probably seen one thousand times on Tumblr, is about 30 miles outside of Marfa in the middle of the endless scrub and brush of West Texas. The “pop architectural land art project” contains actual, real Prada stuff. Originally, it was supposed to remain untouched and decay with the land. But then people repeatedly broke the windows and stole expensive merchandise, so they installed cameras and bullet-proof windows. And this is why we can't have nice things.