Marfa

Up the desert highway a locked Prada storefront stands alone with shoes nobody will ever buy, which tells you what kind of town lies ahead. Marfa sits high and flat in the Chihuahuan Desert, and at golden hour the light goes honeyed and sharp enough to explain everything that has happened here since.

Marfa was a quiet railway and ranching town until Donald Judd left New York in 1971 and began filling a decommissioned army fort with permanent, large-scale art. His Chinati Foundation now holds installations by Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin and others across the old cavalry buildings, including the hundred mill-aluminium boxes whose play of desert light cannot be reproduced in any photograph. Out on the plain east of town, the Marfa Lights have been reported since the 1880s, unexplained orbs that hover and split on clear nights, watched from a dedicated roadside platform with no promise they will show. The town itself runs to a few thousand people, taco kitchens beside galleries, and an isolation that is not a drawback but the medium.