MARFA — For many people who live in and love the Big Bend region, the idea of a steel border wall through some of the country’s most remote and wild landscapes has been a difficult pill to swallow. Almost a year into the saga, the issue has trickled down through social media posts and newspaper articles and lawsuit filings into one of the region’s primary exports –– fine art.
For Presidio-based artist Yosdy Valdivia, her strong emotions over the wall took shape as Mother of the Desert II, an oil on masonite painting of nature embodied as a weeping woman, whose tears become the Rio Grande. When Valdivia opened the doors to Galeria Raíces in 2024, she never expected that her small business would one day become a campaign stop for Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running against Gov. Greg Abbott –– the first gubernatorial candidate ever to visit the sleepy border city.
Hinojosa’s team descended on Galeria Raíces, helping Valdivia don microphones and get the shop campaign social media ready. But when the candidate herself arrived, all of the bustle and pretension faded, and the two women were able to connect heart-to-heart about their experiences growing up on the border. “She had a motherly aura to her, she was mostly just listening,” Valdivia said. “I didn’t see her as this crazy famous person, this politician that potentially could be our next governor.”
Of all the things the two talked about, one issue loomed above the rest: the border wall. Valdivia’s shop is just one of numerous Big Bend businesses allied in the fight against the giant infrastructure project. Politicians as ideologically distant as Hinojosa, a Democrat with a focus on public education, and Brandon Herrera, a First Amendment influencer turned Republican congressional candidate with an edgelord sense of humor, have made fighting the wall part of their ground game in the Big Bend –– an area whose remote location and and sparse population usually prompt statewide candidates to skip it entirely on the campaign trail.
On the other edge of the greater Big Bend region, in the tiny town of Sanderson, the Yellow Brick Art Co. serves a similar dual function as a spot to check out local art and get educated about how the border wall fight is impacting locals. Gallery owner and artist Keirstin Pratt committed her frustration to canvas back in August, when videos by wildlife photographer Natalie Newman of bulldozers tearing into the ground in front of the iconic Santa Elena Canyon went viral.
Desert II by Yosdy Valdivia
Pratt was working a festival during the height of the construction activity in the park. “I didn’t get a chance to feel and grieve what was going on,” she said, and in her spare moments, she started bringing a scene inspired by Newman’s videos to life: javelinas standing in the path of a bulldozer.
The piece, Pra(e)y, is a major departure for Pratt, who says she’s typically inspired by the beauty and joy of life in Far West Texas, rather than sadness or existential dread. “A lot of us feel pressure to record [the construction] in the ways we know how,” she explained. “You’re an artist, but you carry this responsibility to share what’s happening through different lenses, because you never know who you can connect with.”
Pratt was not the only regional artist to depict heavy machinery in their work for the first time after the bulldozers descended on Big Bend National Park. Colleen O’Brien has spent the past few years building an archive of abstract landscape paintings that use natural pigments and textures to record the region’s rivers and canyonlands. To make these large-scale pieces, she hikes or drives in materials to paint en plein air, lending the work an air of literal West Texas grit and authenticity.
When word got out that ground had been broken on Mariscal Mountain, a remote corner of the park that forms the distinctive “big bend” in the Rio Grande, O’Brien and a friend drove out in the middle of the night to document it. O’Brien followed the outline of the new patrol road and laid a canvas down to capture the tire tread of an excavator through a process that felt like making a grave rubbing of a place she loves dearly. “To feel the excavator marks with your own body –– I was checking in and out, trying to be present with this devastating thing that was happening,” she said.
O’Brien was an artist in residence in the National Park in 2024, which prompted her to develop a “leave-no-trace” friendly version of her artistic practice. She was prohibited from using materials from the park in her artwork, so she would carefully document the type of soil, rocks and plants in the area she wanted to depict and then find analogous materials on a friend’s property just outside the park to use for the final work. She thought about the irony of the whole situation as she laid on the mountain, carefully complying with the park’s rules after the government waived dozens of environmental regulations to allow private contractors to work as quickly as possible. “I brought my own natural pigments in, I didn’t use soil from the site, and here it is to record something that’s the most egregious violation of ‘leave no trace,’” she said. “I think that’s so insane.”
The three women will be showing artwork at Marfa’s Club Nowhere during Chinati Weekend, alongside a number of fellow local artists, including Liz Potter of Alpine, who will be showing photography. Potter’s work is typically a solo practice –– she likes camping in the furthest reaches of the Big Bend parks, and taking medium-format photos of landscapes with old-school camera gear.
For most of her tenure out in the Big Bend, the only human figure that would appear in Potter’s work was herself. But she’s shifted to documenting the community’s response to the wall, photographing protests and rallies as the issue winds its way through the court system and local county governments. “Since moving out here in early 2018, my work has really become about celebrating this region and showing the beauty of the desert that was so transformative in my life,” she said. “Now I’m trying to protect it –– [my practice] went from sharing the beauty to sharing to get people to help us protect it.”
The show at Club Nowhere, which will open with a reception on Friday October 9 from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., will not be the only Chinati Weekend programming dedicated to artistic explorations of the border wall. On Monday, Yolanda Alvarado of No Big Bend Wall announced the opening of La Frontera, a show exploring the wall through multimedia work by photographers and journalists Brian Finke, Natalie Newman, Jordan Vondehaar, Hannah Gentiles, and Hillary Pierce. La Frontera will open in the studios across from the Sentinel café the same night as the Club Nowhere show, starting at 7 p.m.
The Border Wall will be on display through Chinati Weekend and beyond at Club Nowhere, 401 South Highland Avenue in Marfa. La Frontera will show at Studio #6, located at 208 West El Paso Street in Marfa. O’Brien will be showing works as an individual at Do Right Hall (110 W Dallas Street) through the weekend, with an opening also on Friday 5-8 p.m.
