Artist experimented with ‘psycho color’ chairs
When artist Cody Barber graduated from Texas Tech with a mass communications degree in 2009, he applied for jobs in television and marketing, but didn’t go straight into his field. He cites the 2008 market crash as cause for a drab job market outlook, which led him to “get creative and start looking for chairs.” He discovered that Lubbock was flooded with mid-century modern furniture of iconic design—thanks to the university’s contracts with Herman Miller and Knoll in the 1950s and ‘60s—which he instinctively gravitated towards. This surplus enabled Barber to collect and “edit” chairs by Eames and Bertoia, adding color to designs that were typically only sold in black and white. “I would powder coat one of these chairs a psycho color you hadn’t seen before,” he says, “which made the final product a recognizable design in an unrecognizable color.”
A Lubbock native, when Barber first moved to Marfa in 2013, he operated a design shop out of the storefront that is now Para Llevar, where he sold powder-coated furniture and other objects of interest—hammers, rakes, pickaxes, you name it. At first, Barber outsourced his powder coating work to a business in Lubbock, but eventually grew tired of the commute. In 2016, he decided to invest in his own equipment and open up shop—unable to find an affordable studio for rent in Marfa, he first operated out of a metal building in Fort Davis.
At the start of the pandemic, Barber was forced to close down his design shop on E. San Antonio and take on more freelance work for builders and homeowners in the area. Today, he operates a fully functional powder coating studio on the south side of town, where he creates his own art and offers powder coating services to the greater Big Bend region, often taking on large-scale architectural projects.
Barber possesses a natural inclination towards good design. “A chair is a standard. So when I started seeing chairs that were different and breaking that standard, and that happened to be in Lubbock, I noticed.” Barber began frequenting a local powder coating shop there armed with old chairs, restoring them to sell them online for income. He refers to himself as a “chair-hunter” during those early, post-college days in which he would cruise around nearby neighborhoods looking for beat-up chairs, sometimes knocking on a stranger’s door and offering them cash for one spotted in the front yard or on a porch—such a situation was dubbed a “porch score.”
With the powder coating shop owner in Lubbock less interested in the small jobs that Barber would bring in over time, his son, Jonathan Shelby, took on the projects for cash after hours. It was during this time together that Barber could ask questions about the process, with Shelby becoming his mentor. “After the first chairs I had powder coated, I thought, ‘I want to do this to everything.’”
As fate would have it, he has. Barber continues to powder coat various furniture, sculptures, bicycle parts, crushed aluminum cans, horseshoes, railroad spikes, and the like. He recalls that his first sculptural venture began when he powder coated a crushed beer can, shifting his focus from the utilitarian to the art form. Barber says the most rewarding part of owning a powder coating studio in Marfa is that it maintains his connection to the community and allows him to “offer something that adds beauty to our town.” Mixing color for Bordo’s front-facing sign and, most recently, transforming the library’s book drop box from light green to Shorthorn purple are among two happily listed examples.
In 2024, a few years after pandemic-acquired projects slowed and he was able to focus on his own work again, Barber debuted Impact Work at the Marfa Country Clinic—a series of aluminum panels intentionally distressed or warped through interactions with various tools and then powder coated in custom color, rendering each piece a record of time, action, and effect. When offered a show at Wrong Gallery in late 2025, Barber seized the opportunity to revisit his work with moiré patterns, a process he explored from 2017 to 2020.
Like much memorable work, Barber’s first foray into Moiré Work was an accident. More than the Eames and Bertoia designs themselves, Barber is infatuated with their material of expanded metal. He honors and obsesses with their materiality, depositing color as an act of play and homage to the original. “I started asking myself,” he recalls, “How can I capture this moment that I love so much in powder coating the chairs and turn it into a work of art?”
A moiré—an optical effect where two similar patterns overlap to create new, shimmering lines or patterns—happens more naturally with fabric, but requires intentional manipulation of the material to make it occur with wire mesh. While experimenting in his studio, Barber realized he was witnessing an optical illusion, resulting from the layering of intricate metal; he could produce distorted, holographic patterns that morphed as he swiveled his gaze, looking through the layers of wire mesh. “I didn’t even know what a moiré was when I first saw it,” Barber says, “It wasn’t until an architect taught me the function of moiré in building design. I only knew that I was witnessing an optical illusion, and I wanted to make more of it.”
Barber draws an unlikely comparison between his latest works and his beginnings of making flyers for the punk bands he played in growing up, layering image on text on image, creating something blurred and new. He says what excites him most about Moiré Work, though, is “the opportunity to physically mix color in real time” for the viewer as they shift around the duochrome frames.
While Barber’s latest work exists as a powerful force on its own, capable of warping reality for the viewer—some claim headaches or disorientation after staring into the hand-welded frames for too long—it could not exist without his chair-hunting past. “Another thing I love about it,” Barber says, “is that it all comes back to the chairs. This is something you wouldn’t know from just looking at any of the work. How would you ever look at one of those pieces and think, chair?”
And yet—chair. In an artist statement for a February 8 show in a New York gallery (which displays a collection of the smaller 6 x 6 moiré works), Barber writes, “The six sculptures I made … are a direct result of chair maintenance. The works have parts that I need to assemble. I think of legs and feet. The graphic moiré patterns they exhibit are visually exciting; spirited backrests.”
But despite Barber’s latest success with Moiré Work and as the sole powder coater in town, the cost of real estate in Marfa makes up much of what he is thinking about these days. Barber has been renting for the past 13 years. As of late 2023, his studio is on the market. Originally listed at $550,000, today the building (paired with the house adjacent) is listed slightly lower at $495,000, rendering it unobtainable to him. The dream to secure his studio and purchase the home directly across the street is somehow out of reach, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how he can afford a new chapter for himself. “It’s the classic trope,” Barber says, speaking of the unexciting story of gentrification, “The artists come in and make an area desirable, then the rich come in and force the artists out. It’s basically what’s happening.”
And in this way, despite its purported values, Marfa remains a difficult place for an artist to build a life, though Barber has no desire to pursue his career elsewhere. “I really can’t imagine doing all of this anywhere else. This town and the people have been really good to me.”
Moiré Work is on view at Wrong Marfa, 110 Highland St., through February 22, 2026.