The Beautiful Chloë monolith piques the curiosity of remote travelers in Casa Piedra
Down a dusty deserted desert road, she stands. The Beautiful Chloë. Naked and alone, her figure graces two sides of a monolith towering toward the sky atop a small hill in Casa Piedra, but who will ever see her?
It’s fall of 2024, and Rusty Martin pours two liquor bottles into a margarita machine struggling to keep pace with the partygoers’ demands. The ice is gone, but the drinkers go ahead and wince at sips from the machine filled with straight liquor. The celebratory atmosphere does not change, though, with the diminished ice, as these invitees have a rare chance to view The Beautiful Chloë up close. It’s a 20-foot-tall monolith that paints an image of a famous actress through the use of thousands of small pieces of glass. Eighteen different shades of gray — along with some stray browns in the tiles — reproduce a famous photo of the woman in the nude from both front and back as she stands in a pose holding her hair.
The partygoers were there for a view on its completion. But the invite came with a caveat: Taking images for personal viewing was fine, but absolutely nothing could be shared on social media. I was invited but told I couldn’t write a story about it — yet.
The work is the brainchild of Marfa filmmakers Rusty Martin and Susan Kirr. “We wanted our audience to be people that just by chance encountered seeing it from the road,” Kirr said. And “by chance” is something that is almost a given. Casa Piedra — a once thriving farming community through the early 1900s about an hour southeast of Marfa — is now just a handful of hardy desert denizens. Casa Piedra Road abuts Big Bend Ranch State Park and begins as a paved Highway 169, 7 miles south of Marfa, but then winds into a rocky, sandy, sometimes treacherous (when it rains) road south to Highway 170.
On recent trips to Martin and Kirr’s land, I only encountered one other vehicle on the 43-mile trip there and the same on the way back. To see The Beautiful Chloë, perched about a quarter of a mile behind the couple’s barbed wire fence, takes a look just at the right moment. And even then, many motorists report that it looks like a figure of some sort, but they aren’t sure of what.
Martin said a partial inspiration for his work was the triangular stainless-steel pillar that showed up in a remote red rock canyon in southeastern Utah in November 2020, followed by other mystery monoliths, most of which disappeared shortly after they were discovered. But a larger driving force for him was to create something that’s there to be there. “They call it ‘MOOP’ at Burning Man, which is ‘matter out of place,’” Martin says. He’s trying to give a bit of history while gazing at the monolith as a stiff, cool wind blows across the hilltop where it stands. You can see miles in all directions at that height.
As for the model, Martin just found her photos rather unique because they include a front side and a back side perfect for a monolith. The idea of a nude came from a neighbor who admitted hiking barefoot and nude down a creek through their property.
The sculpture’s remoteness is intentional, as Martin and Kirr pondered even putting it in a creek — although they realized it likely would wash away. “I don’t need your likes,” Martin says. “I don’t want your likes on Instagram. It’s just the endeavor of doing it. I love the process.”
That process took a lot of planning. The mosaic would be mounted on a steel frame 20 feet tall and 8 feet wide, weighing in at almost two tons. Artaic, a custom tile fabricator, rendered the two photographs into three-fourth-inch mosaic glass, using 18 shades of gray. Each tile became a single pixel in design. Martin and Kirr enlisted a team of talent in 2022 to help with the work. The tile arrived in April 2024
“It took about three months to secure the mosaic glass squares to the concrete board on the steel frame,” Kirr said. Rusty, along with Jerik Gilly, affixed the mosaic tile to the structure. Carolyn Macartney, who was a local Marfa sign painter, was in charge of keeping all the lines straight. Moving back and forth from one side of the frame to the other, she made sure each square foot of tile went into the right place. The tile was then grouted, sanded and sealed. A layer of sealer also went across the top of the piece.
The sculpture was finished in June 2024. The team included:
Rusty Martin, artist
Susan Kirr, project manager
Bobby Crockett, consultant
Jerik Gilly, fabricator and mosaic installation
Nathan Kandus, design drawings
Dan Ray, structural engineer
Carolyn Macartney, director of lines and placement
Mark Morrison, cement work
