Marfa courthouse and main street
— a county seat the artists found.
Not only on a wall.
Marfa courthouse and main street, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Presidio County Courthouse rises pink at the north end of Highland Avenue, a Second Empire pile in painted brick and cast iron, finished in 1886. The mansard roof was lost in a 1940s renovation and rebuilt in the 2000s, and the dome carries a statue of Justice without her scales — local legend says a cowboy shot them off. Down Highland the storefronts hold galleries, a bookstore, the Hotel Paisano where Giant was filmed in 1955, and a coffee bar Donald Judd's neighbors started. The light is the famous thing. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Marfa sits on the high plain of the Trans-Pecos at about 4,830 feet, in Presidio County, with the Davis Mountains to the north and the Chinati Mountains to the south. The town was founded in the 1880s as a railroad water stop and named, by a story still repeated, after a character in a Russian novel the railroad official's wife was reading. The population sits near 1,800. Marfa became a national art destination after Donald Judd moved here from New York in 1971 and began the installations that became the Chinati Foundation.
The Presidio County Courthouse, completed in 1886 to designs by Alfred Giles, anchors the north end of Highland Avenue. It is a Second Empire building in painted brick and cast iron, three stories with a mansard roof and a central dome topped by a statue of Justice missing her scales — a long-running local story credits a nineteenth-century cowboy with shooting them off. The mansard was removed in a 1940s remodel and reconstructed in a 2000-2001 restoration. The Hotel Paisano, built in 1930, sits a few blocks south and hosted the Giant cast in 1955.
Photographers come to Marfa for the light. The combination of high elevation, dry air, and a wide horizon stretches the golden hour and gives the courthouse and the brick storefronts an unusual pink-and-gold cast in late afternoon. The Marfa Lights — unexplained nighttime glows seen east of town toward Mitchell Flat — have been reported since the 1880s and have a state-built viewing platform off US 90 about nine miles east. The Chinati Foundation's permanent installations open the surrounding desert to the same long evening light.
