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Art Blocks Marfa Weekend 2026: 4 Days, 3 Gallery Shows and Code on the Facades

At its sixth Marfa Weekend, Art Blocks staged a new show in its gallery each day, from EMULATION to LACMA's Synthetic Topographies and NEORT++'s Quietus Machine, while museums debated the next 100 years at the Crowley Theater.

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When Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon first saw Donald Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, he found 2 ideas he still ties to generative art: permanence and variability. That lineage is why the company keeps a house in Marfa, and why, from October 22 to 25, it brought artists, collectors and museum people back to the West Texas town for the sixth Marfa Weekend, spread across the Art Blocks Gallery, the Crowley Theater, Saint George Hall, glitch Gallery, One Fourteen and the Palace Theater.

The gallery changed its show every day. On Thursday the Museum of Art and Light presented EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500, and for all 3 nights it carried Art Blocks works out of the house and onto the town, projecting them at large scale on the facades of the Hotel Saint George, the Crowley Theater and the Godbold building. On Friday LACMA took over with Synthetic Topographies, curated by Deliasofia Zacarias, which asked what happens when landscapes are written in code. Drawing on the Mneme Foundation Collection and Art Blocks, it gathered works by Matt DesLauriers, William Mapan, Robert Hodgin, Nicole Vella, Kazuhiro Tanimoto, Helena Sarin, Manoloide, Sarah Meyohas and Lu Yang, among others. On Saturday the Tokyo platform NEORT++ opened Quietus Machine for a single day: 3 processors in acrylic cubes on aluminum stands, each computing a work without pause. Takens Theorem showed Timescale, an imagined close up of the chip drawn from die photographs; rudxane's Here with me sensed its own temperature and the radio signals around it; Satoshi Aizawa's Disturbed Memory struck a new character over the old one each time a bit flipped, like a typewriter. NEORT++ traced the idea to Gustav Metzger's auto destructive art and Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube: a digital work that, given a body, can also die.

The talks were about time as well. Thursday night at the Crowley, director Logan Woodyard screened his film Emergence in Marfa and discussed it with Art Blocks' Jeff Davis and Anna Carreras. Friday morning, Davis moderated The Next Hundred Years, with speakers from LACMA, the Museum of Art and Light, NODE and the Centre Pompidou on how institutions program, acquire and conserve digital work. Another panel debuted ABX, Art Blocks' open protocol for putting work onchain beyond any single platform, with ryley o, DADABOTS, Han and Calderon; Bryan Brinkman's Squeegee was among the first works made with it.

Around those anchors, the town filled in. The Artist Fair at Saint George Hall ran Friday and Saturday, with Vinnie Hager's Letters From Marfa turning works into postcards; glitch Gallery was the weekend's programming partner; and 8NAP House showed Dangiuz's Blue Screen of Death in an LED light box. A generative commemorative poster let each attendee add a sprite of themselves at check in. The weekend closed at the reopened Palace Theater with a drone show over the desert, a fitting last image for a gathering about code that keeps running long after the screen goes dark.

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