I posted this in response to @new4now in another subverse but had been planning to post this info on GreatAwakening.

The story most often found about Marfa, TX and how it became an art/celebrity mecca is that artist Donald Judd rented a house there in 1971:

“due in part to the harsh and glib situation within art in New York"

He wound up buying an abandoned army base that had been a detention center for German prisoners of war. There were a number of barracks and two massive brick sheds that had been used to repair tanks and artillery pieces.

RC's friend Rita Ackerman made her a gift and sent it to her from Marfa, TX.

“Olivier, look at the dress Rita Ackermann made me for my birthday… It just arrived from Marfa, Texas… The best present I have gotten in a very long time.” Text and photo Rachel Chandler

In Purple Diary Fr./nightpics2009, there's a photo captioned:

Rachel Chandler, Paz de la Huerta, Rita Ackermann, and Dan Colen at The Bowery Hotel, New York, February 2009.

In a hotel room, Dan's on the bed, and the girls are goofing for the camera, giving him a massage. NSFW Keep in mind that Epstein's girls are all about giving 'massages' and more, in various stages of undress.

Dan Colen is the friend of Dash Snow that together, they ritualized doing drugs via their hamster NEST, recreated as an art exhibit/celebration here the day after Secret Snow was born.

At any rate back to the birthday present dress from Rita Ackerman. I assume 'Oliver' refers to Oliver Zahm. He's a photographer seen often in pictures for the NSFW Purple Nights series. In the 2008 edition, RC looks really young with Zahm's hand on her breast (she's clothed). If I had to pick someone being RC's 'handler' he'd be top of the list, based on the pics he shows up in, and because it's easy to find him at the Standard Hotel. (Waris Ahluwalia, and Oliver Zahm , as well as Thomas Lenthal are often photographed together at those parties, not to mention Terence Koh and Terry Richardson).

Marfa may be 200 miles away from an airport, but it's 50 miles away from the Mexican border.

I found a good article about Dash Snow's great grandmother Dominique Schlumberger, and grandmother Christophe De Menil, I was surprised to read about Marfa there too.

Dominique Schlumberger, a French heiress with fortunes in the textile and oil-field markets, met John De Menil at a ball at Versailles. They were married in 1931, when she was 22 and De Menil was 27. Upon returning from their Moroccan honeymoon, they commissioned Max Ernst to paint Dominique’s portrait and rode on horseback down the Bois de Boulogne. It was a grand life until the Nazis invaded France, at which point Dominique fled Paris for Cuba with her children; the eldest, Christophe, had chicken pox. Decades later, Christophe De Menil married the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman long before his second wife gave birth to the actress Uma Thurman, and the couple had a daughter together, named Taya, who is the mother Dash Snow refers to as a scumbag.

But some important things in the art world happened along the way. The De Menils ended up in Houston, where they started collecting important works by Léger, Matisse, Cézanne, Braque, Picasso, which they kept in the vast home they had designed by Philip Johnson. The radical European collectors stood out in Texas, and they had the politics to match. The De Menils regularly invited black guests to dinner during the era of segregation. They attempted to give a sculpture called Broken Obelisk to the city, but Houston refused their condition that it be dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (It sits in front of the Rothko Chapel, also financed by the De Menils.) When John died, his funeral was attended by a local contingent from the Black Panther Party.

In her lifetime, Dominique was regularly listed in Forbes magazine as one of the 400 richest people in America. After the war, the family would return to France from time to time, to Val-Richer, the Schlumberger family estate in Normandy, a renovated eleventh-century abbey. “Each branch of the Schlumberger clan has a wing,” Dash Snow’s grandmother Christophe De Menil told a reporter in 1986. “It gives us a strong family feeling.”

In fact, it was Christophe who first became interested in modern art and encouraged her parents to become collectors. Over time, she and her four siblings would use their enormous wealth to promote the arts: Christophe’s sister Philipa De Menil concentrated the bulk of her inheritance in the Dia Art Foundation, which she founded with her husband in 1974. Dia funded, for example, Donald Judd’s majestic installation in Marfa, Texas, and Walter DeMaria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/26288/index5.html

Many questions about the significance of Marfa, TX no doubt https://hyperallergic.com/73377/why-is-playboy-erecting-a-neon-bunny-in-marfa-texas/?wt=2

@comprametu