Texas Venue Directory
Ballroom Marfa
Historic ballroom adapted as a cultural venue · Marfa
Nonprofit art and performance organization operating from a former Marfa dance hall.
About this room
Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn founded Ballroom Marfa in 2003 as a nonprofit contemporary art and performance space, in a building that had been a dance hall since 1927. It sits in a town of under two thousand people in Presidio County, in the art scene that grew up around Donald Judd's installations after he moved out from New York in 1971. It commissions work rather than collecting it, and its best-known commission is Prada Marfa, the roadside sculpture Elmgreen & Dragset installed in 2005. Admission is free.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- It commissioned Prada Marfa: the permanent roadside sculpture west of town, a sealed luxury boutique opening onto nothing, was a 2005 Ballroom commission by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and the original intention was to let the desert do whatever it was going to do to it. Source
- Marfa's county is among the poorest in the country. The NEA describes Presidio County as ranked fourteenth-poorest in the United States, in a town with a majority Latino population and an economy otherwise based on ranching and tourism. Source
- The organization killed its own biggest project. Ballroom spent from 2006 developing an outdoor Drive-In venue; in 2014 the board concluded it had outgrown the original vision and would require fundraising that compromised core programming, and stopped. Source
- A Ballroom commission was performed on the White House South Lawn: rafa esparza's 'bust: indestructible columns' in 2019. Source
Venue details
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