Marfa 2025
by Anton Zuiker on August 4, 2025
Broken, 2020-2025, by Katherine Shaughnessy
Erin’s sister, Katherine Shaughnessy, is an artist living in Boise, Idaho, where she makes her art and runs the Common Well, a “creative league and co-working club.”
Katherine and her Common Well partner, with support from the Alexa Rose Foundation, had organized House on Fire, a residency for a group of Idaho artists so they could visit the art mecca of Marfa, Texas. As part of the tour, Katherine would be unveiling a new piece of art that we’ve known her to be working on for years.
In Cleveland last week, Erin and I decided we should get to Marfa to surprise Katherine and to be there to celebrate her vision. We’d last been in Marfa ten years ago—that trip was during my blogging and social media sabbatical, so there’s not much for me to link to except this post, but it was an important stage in my refocusing on my health and my family—and I was happy to have a reason to get back.
So, we flew to El Paso the night before the residency’s opening dinner; we worked in the morning from our hotel, got lunch at Taconeta, and then drove into the wide open desert of West Texas.
We arrived in Marfa just in time to quickly set up in our Airbnb lodging at BOHEMIO Marfa and get dressed up in clean shirts and our boots, then get to the Capri special event space (across from the Thunderbird Hotel, with which it used to be partnered) just as Katherine was walking through the door into the courtyard. After whoops of happiness and hugs all around, we joined the House on Fire group for cocktails in the bar, borderlands music by local musician Primo Arrasco and his friends under the arbor, and a delicious long-table dinner by chef Jocelyn Jerrils (I had about six servings of the delicious tomato and tomatillo salad with chincharron crumbs, charred scallion, and yogurt). At 8 p.m., the big doors came up for a free showing of the Idaho artist’s work, open to the entire community, in the stunning Capri space (check it out online to see how it’s used a few times a year for destination weddings).
For the next two days, we joined Katherine as she led the group on a busy schedule of visits to art galleries and artist studios, including a stunning exhibit of Christopher Wool’s art in a giant gallery, a curator’s tour of Ballroom Marfa and its current exhibit, Los Encuentros, and a walk with Julie Speed through her studio in a former jail that overlooks the Donal Judd sculptures at the Chinati Foundation (the group toured that before we arrived).
The river
And the highlight of the weekend, for me, was Katherine’s unveiling of two new works of her own inside the empty Do Right Hall (a former church owned by her good friends Camp and Buck, who also own the Wrong store in town, a great place to buy art and jewelry): Broken, a series of 308 birch panels, each 8 inches by 8 inches and representing approximately nine square miles of land along the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, and also Complementary, a textile she’d woven from the threads of U.S.A. and Mexico flags.
Back in 2020, when Anna and I had visited her in Boise, Katherine had shown us the first of the panels of her new project. And the last time I was in Marfa, Katherine had organized a day trip for our families to raft the river in Big Bend State Park.
So, standing in front of the finished work, I felt awed by Katherine’s vision, her artistry, her scale and scope. Watch Katherine’s timelapse reel showing the installation of Broken.
Food and drink
That first night, there were a couple of Spicy Oaxaca cocktails: mezcal, serrano agave, lime, and cempa sal on the rim.
On our final night, the artists on their way home to Idaho, we returned to Cochineal for dinner with Katherine and her husband, Tom Michael, along with University of New Hampshire journalism professor Tom Haines and Kelly Close, a relative of Erin and Katherine. Tom Michael was the founder and first station manager of Marfa Public Radio and currently is manager of Boise Public Radio and like half of America he was reeling from the news of the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Kelly was in from San Francisco, where we’d visited her last fall, and would soon be off to Washington to advocate for people with diabetes. Tom Haines was planning his return to UNH after a year-long sabbatical in Marfa.
We all went for the chef’s menu at Cochineal, which that night featured tartare of Nilgai (an introduced antelope that escaped and is now wild in west Texas), fried but moist quail with mesquite honey, a single grilled Texas gulf shrimp in a pool of corn chowder (the table favorite), terrine of wild boar, tender grilled bison, and banana pudding. I enjoyed a Paloma fumeé made with mezcal.
Since we were so close to Mexico—the U.S. Border Control has a regional hub in Marfa with a yard full of white-and-green trucks; we had to pass through one checkpoint on the interstate outside of El Paso—I hoped to get a good bottle of the spirit, and it turns out Cactus Liquors in Marfa has an excellent collection of tequila, mezcal, and sotol. I’ve come home with two bottles of mezcal (one that I sampled in Julie Speed’s studio) and a bottle of sotol.
Marfa is small. Marfa is art. Marfa is peaceful. Marfa is most fun with family and friends to guide you. So glad we went.
The House on Fire artists
Extras
- We were at Capri until late, so I missed singer Kate Short at nearby Planet Marfa.
- See Julie Speed’s Instagram post with the Idaho artists.
- For lunch one day, we picked up delicious sandwiches from the Italian deli Bordo and took them back to BOHEMIO.
- On its website, Ballroom Marfa uses an open-source font called Marfa.
- At other stores in town, I also got myself a Stetson Open Road straw hat and ordered a pair of cowboy boots.
- Over on Wan Smol Blog, I posted photos and lists of the wildlife I saw on the trip, including one roadrunner and a nocturnal kit fox.
Previous post: Union Market
Go to HOME