As part of the Artist-in-Residence program at The Chinati Foundation (a non-profit gallery dedicated to the late Donald Judd), Rita Ackermann packed her bags, headed to Texas and chronicled for BlackBook her adventures with gun smugglers, drug lords and a dog named Mouse. See full gallery.

Marfa is a rather strange place, an artful and artificial oasis in the middle of the Texan desert, three hours from the El Paso airport, a straight road to peace. When Donald Judd first traveled through Marfa as a soldier in the early ’70s, it was just another ghost town. It once housed German war prisoners and was famous for giving shape to Western movies, its vast landscape the background to many films, including There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men.

The Chinati Foundation was established by Donald Judd and his friends, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin, each of whom had his own art space, either in town or on-site. My favorite is the museum of John Chamberlain’s monster balls created from crumpled car parts. In 1989, the foundation established an artist residency, which, while writing this from Judd’s former studio, I’m taking part in. Hanging around town, working with the elements and interacting—almost exclusively—with the locals can lead to surprising adventures.

I only brought with me one drawing to work on. It has a cave painting–like simplicity to it, showing bodies caught in provocative, violent movements. Mixing the urban primitive with nature’s brutishness, I befriended a man named Ty, an outlaw gun smuggler and El Salvadoran war veteran. A slashed-faced, broken-boned, 7-foot-tall cowboy, Ty has royal style and grace. He is the archetype of cool, the last American gentleman. He lives outside of the rules, as does the painter Christopher Wool, who has a studio down here. One day, the three of us drove around together in Ty’s pickup truck, Christopher sitting in the back next to the giant guns and the beer cooler, me in the front with Ty’s tiny black dog named Mouse. We shared an instant connection, despite our clashing backgrounds, while Ty told us stories about Mexican drug lord Pablo Acosta (his former boss), being bothered by border patrol and bandits, and explained that, in the end, gun size settles most disputes.

It’s on this afternoon that I’ve decided to write this diary. I love driving and have an obsession with wrecked and crashed cars, with their chipped paint and the scratch marks on their metal bodies. These, to me, are beautiful paintings. And there are a lot of them here, blending into the landscape, bleeding into the wilderness and taken apart in backyards. The backyards here scream freedom. Nothing is thrown away; it’s never tidied. Everything is allowed—even games of tic-tac-toe using spray-paint on the walls—which is really what art should be about: freedom.