Issy Wood at Bull Room
Ballroom Marfa has several events heading into fall. Here’s a sneak peek. Tickets and more info for all events can be found at ballroommarfa.org.
Saturday, September 12, 8 p.m.
UK-based painter and experimental pop star Issy Wood will play at Bull Room on Golf Course Road. Living and working between London and Los Angeles, Issy’s music explores the states of her inner and outer emotional world in a vulnerable yet playful manner, laid out through confessional lyrics encapsulated within lo-fi pop and synthesizers.
An evening with artist/filmmaker Sky Hopinka
Saturday, September 26, at Bull Room
Doors 7 p.m., film at 7:30 p.m. with artist talk to follow
The program will feature a curated showcase of Sky Hopinka’s short films at Bull Room, followed by a conversation with the artist and curator Jami Powell. Hopinka’s films offer a powerful and distinctive approach to Indigenous storytelling, weaving together moving images, sound, poetry, and language to create immersive works rooted in Native histories and cultural memory while engaging contemporary cinematic and technological forms.
The evening will kick off a month-long outdoor film installation featuring the selection of Hopinka’s works, projected nightly at sunset on the Marfa horizon on the facade of Bull Room, experiencing the films against the backdrop of the desert landscape.
TERRA FORM: A Clay Workshop with Adam Stacey
October 3 and 4, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at The Capri
Join Ballroom Marfa for TERRA FORM, a hands-on clay workshop led by artist and educator Adam Stacey. Participants will explore foundational ceramic techniques including slab construction, underglazing, firing and finishing processes while considering clay as both a material and a connection to place.
Each participant will create a hand-built ceramic planter while exploring the relationship between clay, place and contemporary craft practices. Finished with underglaze and fired, each piece will become a functional sculptural object to take home. Free morning coffee from Mutual Friends will be on hand for all participants.
Each workshop session is limited to 12 participants. To reserve a spot, email info@ballroommarfa.org.
Andrew Durbin reading and discussion
Saturday, October 24, at Bull Room
Doors at 6 p.m., with reading beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Writer and author Andrew Durbin will do a reading and discussion of his latest book: The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026).
The reading will be followed by an in-depth conversation between Durbin, curator Tim Johnson, and writer Eileen Myles about the book. The program will conclude with a book signing, with copies available for purchase.
When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, 23 and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the 22-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation — an entanglement that changed American art forever.
Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation — from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.
Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary-burning, paradigm-tilting, never-more-relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men’s inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world — and two men who defined it.
