In their quest to complete their study and to share a better knowledge and understanding of a part of Texas that is still somewhat a frontier, authors Louise S. O'Connor and Cecilia Thompson reveal the first volume of their book Marfa and Presidio County, Texas: A Social, Economic, and Cultural Study 1937 to 2008 Volume One, 1937-1989. In a book that offers a closer look at the past and the present, readers will see how a place known as a tourist area and a center of contemporary art came to be. It returns to the pre-historic era of Far West Texas and bring readers up to the present with yearly reports on the region as well as extensive formal research and personal interviews with present day people who live in Presidio County. A case study worth reading, this book is an eye-opener for a better understanding of how this small yet historically rich land is what it is now. Packed with the economic, social, and cultural history of Presidio County; this book gives readers, both lay and the historians, a clear and complete picture of the events that lead to the preservation, industrialization, and the improvement of one of the frontiers of the United States of America.
What happened to the documents captured in the Alamo? Does a ghost actually haunt the state capitol in Austin? Was John Wilkes Booth killed or did he escape and flee to Central Texas? The authors present the known facts and circumstances of these and other mysteries.
This book is an extension of conversations began at Marfa Sounding, a three-year exploration into the acoustic processes of a specific place, which began as a 2015 curatorial residency with Fieldwork Marfa, an international program run by Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, France; the University of Houston School of Art; and HEAD, Geneva. Focusing on "phase shifting" in music, particularly as it relates to early experiments in Minimalism and artists whose practices run from the 1960s into the present, Marfa Sounding hosted writers from many different backgrounds--composers, sound theorists, art critics, dance historians, filmmakers, educators, students, curators, and archivists?who treat performance as a point of departure for thinking through the intersection of music, minimalism, and the political. Marfa Sounding treated sound as a frame for understanding how art integrates with, invades, and is effectively produced by its context. The spaces of Marfa also became frames for sound as individual and collective experience, where people come together at a specific place and time, in a site that enfolds them.