Slide #4

Can you tell me a bit about the Oral History Project? We received a grant from the NEA in 2005 to start the Oral History Project. Then in 2006 we hired an Executive Director. We had been participating to a small degree every year in the annual open house in Marfa, but because we had this new Executive Director, we wanted to do something more for the community than just opening our doors. Her and my community interest and the filming in Marfa created a confluence of opinion that we needed to recognize the people in Marfa who actually worked with Don. We also wanted Open House-- our first major participation in years-- to be more about the local community than about the international visitors. We wanted to celebrate Marfa and give recognition to the 'hidden people.' We found Karen Bernstein, who worked with Marfa Public Radio, and there was this whole conversation [at the radio station] about our hiring her to interview all these people who knew my dad. On one hand I didn’t want to get involved because I was busy, but eventually I was like, "ok I’ll go down there," and we started doing it together, started interviewing all these different people. We interviewed 17 people in the first week and it was beautiful. The guy who shot it, Lance Webb, was original to Marfa, and then once we looked at all the material we realized we needed some New Yorkers to kind of tell the story of how he [Donald Judd] got there. So we did 10 more interviews in September in New York. And that was really the beginning of the Oral History project, because that was 30 interviews right there, and we went on to do 60 more over time and when we had money. What’s the general idea of the Oral History Project? The idea of the Oral History Project is to create a context for both communities, because even though we’re a foundation created by an individual, we don’t feel that we’re responsible for just that individual’s spaces and what he wanted to accomplish with those spaces, which was to allow access and to really be kind of bed-rocked in what his thinking and philosophy is--which a lot of his philosophy is really interesting-- and also as a way to appreciate his work and get his work out there. We also feel like every individual is part of a community and the more sense you can get of that—especially of SoHo in the 70’s—there’s this whole other way of thinking and way of working and way of life that this generation needs to learn from and be inspired by, so the Oral History Project was a way to preserve our history and context, and we’re not even done. We keep trying to catch people before they die. Cool, so I guess this is a project that can continue to grow? Yes. People are amazing; a lot of the people had never been interviewed before. Like Giorgio DeLuca, (co-founder of Dean and Deluca), who’s a fascinating person, he had never been videotaped before, and he’s dynamic, he’s got incredible philosophy, and he’s kind of audacious. And then you interview somebody who’s a quiet, humble craftsman or worker, and I just have a soft spot for people like that. I can’t underestimate that they might show up not knowing what they want to say, but by the time you get into it, there’s something that they do want to say. It feels great to be that place to capture their story, because you don’t know how else it would get captured. [Judd Foundation in Marfa, photo via] Watch the trailer for Marfa Voices below:
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