Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011) was an architect, artist, and professor of architecture. Born in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome, she attended graduate school at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. Vinciarelli moved to New York City in 1969, where she became involved in the Institute…
In the late 1960s, Donald Judd travelled in the Southwest United States, throughout Arizona and New Mexico in search of a place that would be amenable to living and also allow him to work on a large-scale. He found that Marfa met his desire for a town with a small population and mild winter climate,…
In 1990, Donald Judd purchased a two-story building on the main street of Marfa. In order to restore the building to its original appearance, he had the white paint and plaster that had been applied to the exterior removed, returning it to its red brick façade. Judd created a working architecture office on the first floor…
In the summer of 1960, Donald Judd moved into a loft on 53 East 19th Street in New York City where he would live and work for nine years. 19th Street was where he wrote the majority of his early art criticism and where he made many of the paintings later included in Donald Judd:…
In his 1986 essay, “On Furniture,” Donald Judd opens with the contention that furniture and architecture must be functional, as opposed to art, which is “the assertion of someone’s interest regardless of other considerations.” Judd’s initial designs were made for specific purposes, including sinks for 101 Spring Street and a bed, desks, and chairs for…
Between the years 1967 and 1992, Donald Judd made eight different sets of works in editions ranging from three to two hundred. As diverse as his unique works in three dimensions, Judd’s works in editions were made for the floor, the wall, and the table in a range of materials: stainless steel, galvanized iron, cold-rolled…
Donald Judd studied painting at the Art Students League of New York from 1948 to 1953, his paintings from the mid-1950s onward saw a series of stylistic transitions. The oil paintings he made between 1956 and 1958 feature broad, irregular shapes that are neither strictly organic nor geometric. The paintings he made between 1959 and 1962 feature map-like…
In spring of 1968, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a major exhibition of works by Donald Judd, the first in a series of exhibitions devoted to younger artists. Don Judd was curated by William C. Agee and was on view from February 27 to March 24, 1968. In his opening catalog remarks Agee contended that, “This…
Donald Judd amassed an impressive resume of writing as a for-hire art critic, often reviewing over 15 shows a month during a six-year period from 1959-1964. Although this period of Judd’s writing is notable for the categorical utterances housed within brief reviews that occasionally ran no more than five sentences long, it is also during…
In an interview from 1989 Donald Judd stated: “While I was in the army, the US Army, for a year and a half – World War II had only been over a year – they gave the soldiers all sorts of books, paperbacks. This was the beginning of educational paperbacks in the United States. The books…
“A gallery across Fifty-Seventh Street from the Wise, the Green Gallery, beginning its second year, is interesting because of its wide presentation of unknown but inventive young painters and sculptors. It is something of an uptown Tenth Street gallery.” – Donald Judd This is how Donald Judd closed his early essay, “New York City –…
The fall of 1959 was significant for both Yayoi Kusama and Donald Judd; Kusama had her first solo show in New York City in at the Brata Gallery in October and Judd was hired to write reviews for ARTnews in September. Although, as Judd noted, “I wrote criticism as a mercenary and would never have written…
In 1982, Donald Judd purchased Casa Perez, one of three ranches on the 40,000 acres of land that he collectively called Ayala de Chinati. Located forty-five miles from Marfa in southern Presidio County, Casa Perez ranch contains an adobe ranch house from the early twentieth century, which was formerly the main house of a goat…
“During the summer of 1968 we drove from Colorado through Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. I was looking for a place, but one not much more than a campsite. The next summer we drove down the gulf coast of Baja California, which is excessively perfect in its lack of vegetation, inland at Bahía San Luis…
“Tonight we were at the McDonald Observatory,” Donald Judd wrote in a note from October 12, 1987, “You look at the sky at once, but the light of the stars you see are all different, all being seen as different times.” Judd engaged in observation using his own Questar telescope. Purchasing the telescope in the…
The development and production of Donald Judd’s furniture resulted partially from necessity, as he wrote in 1993: “There was no furniture and none to be bought, either old, since the town [Marfa, Texas] had not shrunk or changed much since its beginning in 1883, or new, since the few stores sold only fake antiques or tubular…
“It’s impossible to go the store and buy a chair,” Donald Judd wrote in his 1993 essay “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp.” It was out of necessity that he began to design furniture; first a pair of sinks for 101 Spring Street and then a bed for his children’s room in Marfa, Texas….
“This exhibition has been assembled from collections throughout the United States and is the first of Chavin art anywhere. As is customary at the Museum of Primitive Art, it is excellently displayed.” – Donald Judd, Review (“The Chavín Civilization”), February 1962 The handwritten notes above are the last two sentences of Donald Judd’s May/June 1962…
In June 1970, in response to the tragedy at Kent State University where four students were shot and killed by National Guardsman, as well as the growing Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements, Artforum asked a number of artists to respond to the following question, “What is your position regarding the kinds of political action…
Judd Foundation is pleased to present Local History, featuring findings from the Judd Foundation Archives. In this series, the Foundation will share visual and textual documentation of Donald Judd’s life and work contained within the Archives as a tool to understand the diverse range of his thinking. Selected to open Local History is a 1946 telegram which marks Judd’s first encounter with West Texas, a region that would become central…