Like many Texans, my family is spread around the state. Aunts, uncles, siblings, parents, and cousins of various degrees live in places big and small. We hail from Taft, Lubbock, Houston, Maypearl. Waco, Mckinney, Dalhart, and San Antonio.

From windmills and grand skies to rivers and towering buildings, our landscapes vary greatly. So do our local economies. As with the more than 1,200 towns and cities in Texas, our municipalities have a wide array of industries supporting them: farming and ranching, oil and gas, cybersecurity and space travel, colleges and universities, manufacturing and insurance, tourism and hospitality. Perhaps like your larger family, we also represent a vast range in how we each see the world.

Human Forms

The smaller a Texas town is, the more a single force can shape its trajectory.

Marfa, with a population of less than 2,000, is the state’s only town made famous by modern art. In the early 1970s, a New York artist named Donald Judd made Marfa his home, started buying property, and over time purchased two ranches and a decommissioned military fort. In contrast to most art museums that boast rotating exhibits, Judd converted the fort’s large open buildings into permanent gallery spaces for a limited number of artists, so that the deeper intention of their works might be better understood. These works are now cared for by the Chinatti Foundation.

When Michelle, our girls, and I visited Chinatti in 2019, it felt almost obligatory. Like other West Texas tourists, we had been lured to Marfa by it’s mystique. We arrived curious, open and hopeful that there would be some “there there,” that the cowboy emperor of sculpture would be wearing clothes.

We saw two of Judd’s exhibits, both of which stand firm thirty five years after his passing. The first of these is indoors, spread across two giant sheds, “100 untitled works in mill aluminum.” The second is in an adjacent field outside, “15 untitled works in concrete.”

For me, both exhibits are a study in human perception and communication. Their oversized, angular, fixed objects point to why it is so hard for people to truly understand one another. Across the giant sheds, there are 100 metal boxes, all the same size, but with vastly different contours inside. As time passes, light from the outside changes how the contents of the boxes are illuminated and obscured. Much like our brains processing information and ignorance, each box processes the outside stimuli in its own unique ways.

Outdoors, in that nearby field, giant concrete slabs are positioned in over a dozen different ways. They face, juxtapose, and/or ignore one another, as they have since their installation decades before. While the aluminum boxes show how knowledge is processed differently by each person’s mind, these concrete tables reflect the stances we take towards one another, how we do and do not turn towards each other. They also speak to the extreme difficulty that changing our positions can take, no matter how many years or clouds pass by.

Miracle of Mutual Understanding

As far as I can see, Judd’s work, like West Texas itself, is a meta-study in perspective. He illuminates something a teacher once shared with me, “it’s a miracle anytime two people understand each other.” But he multiplied the lesson many times over.

While at Chinatti, the light hit the contours of my thinking in just the right ways. Though I have no idea what Donald Judd was actually thinking when designing these works, the lessons feel clear in my own metal box of a brain. Depending on the time of day or the season of life, we humans can be heavy or light. Reflective or dull. Stubborn or pliable. We can be the massive concrete block or the porous cloud passing by. We can be the immobile box or the sun rising and setting.

Likewise, our cities and towns can face one another, or they can stand with backs turned for decades. As can our families. Our relational walls can be made of clear glass or solid brick. The norm of misunderstanding can be magnified or, at least at times, upended. My hope is that the more we tune into our terrain, the more miracles will come to pass.