The Marfa Years - Erik Brunetti Foundation for the Arts

The Marfa Years

Untitled, 2014. Branded Cowhide.

Created during the artist’s Far West Texas residency, this work employs raw cowhide as both surface and medium. Symbols are seared directly into the hide—appropriated, inverted, and decontextualized—to interrogate notions of authorship, Americana, and cultural entropy. First shown at Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York, the piece epitomizes Erik Brunetti’s Marfa-era lexicon of scorched iconography and frontier minimalism.

This archive chronicles Erik Brunetti’s Far West Texas period, centered in Marfa—a crucible of post-minimalist art, site-specific installation, and frontier mythologies. From 2011 to 2016, Brunetti developed a body of work grounded in branded symbolism, Americana iconoclasm, and material intervention. During this time, he forged a creative bond with legendary Texan artist Boyd Elder—best known for designing The Eagles’ album covers—who became both subject and collaborator in Brunetti’s photographic documentation.

Brunetti fabricated a series of custom branding irons during this period, used to sear ideograms, trademarks, and semantic reversals into ethically sourced hides—raw material transformed into large-format wall works. These pieces, first exhibited at Vito Schnabel’s gallery in New York, collapse notions of authorship, permanence, and territorial marking. The work sits in intentional dialogue with Marfa’s art historical canon—Donald Judd, Christopher Wool—and extends it into contemporary, subcultural cartographies.

Preserved by the Erik Brunetti Foundation for the Arts, a federally recognized 501(c)(3) public charity, this collection exists in cultural trust. Maintained for academic access, institutional loan, and historical preservation, its contents support critical inquiry and curatorial study. Contributions to Marfa Journal—though selectively included—are documented as part of the broader creative landscape.

Non-commercial. Held in permanent trust.

Formal loan requests from accredited institutions considered. Inquiries subject to curatorial discretion.