In this past weekend’s NY Times Magazine there was a gushing story called “New Mexico Is Where the Outlaw Artists Live” which became a mecca for artists a century ago which is happening again as I write this. The article leads with the story of two different artists – Agnes Martin and Judy Chicago – who both lived in the historic village of Galisteo, just four miles from our MEA campus. Here are some of my favorite parts of the lengthy article:
- New Mexico has given Chicago, 85, what art world centers cannot. ‘It’s very difficult to think against the culture, which is what I’ve done for my career,’ she said. ‘And in order to do it, I had to have an immense amount of psychic privacy.’ She found that privacy in the silence and stillness of the desert…People here in New Mexico have reinvented themselves, invented their lives, because there’s not a strong structure here that you’re supposed to fit in.’
- “New Mexico became a crossroads for the international avant-garde during the 1920s thanks in large part to Mabel Dodge Luhan, a society heiress turned doyenne of New York bohemia, who bought land in Taos in 1918. Entranced by Native traditions (and by Tony Lujan, a Pueblo man whose name she anglicized when they married), Luhan established a retreat of sorts, inviting artists and intellectuals to live and work in the adobe houses on her property. Passing through town in those years, one might have found Willa Cather, Andrew Dasburg, Martha Graham, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, John Marin or Paul Strand enjoying a sabbatical.”
- Galisteo artist Harmony Hammond says, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.” In New Mexico, Hammond discovered “a different quality of time” and a rare degree of acceptance. “I like all the metaphors of the West, where there’s space for everybody,” she said, dressed in black down to her cowboy boots, white hair pulled back from her sun-tanned face. “There’s room to be who you think you are or want to be. And it’s always been that, especially for women.”
- Meredith Monk, an experimental singer, composer and multifaceted artist who has been coming to New Mexico since the 1970s and spends three months a year at her home in Cañones. “You feel like a dinosaur could come walking across the land.” Traces of slow erosion riddle the earth, from the ragged canyons and arroyos to the rocks whittled into hoodoos by untold centuries of rain and wind. “I’m not trying to be morbid, but dying there would just be another event in nature,” said Monk. “There’s something that is so affecting about knowing that you’re just a tiny part of this huge, huge landscape.” New Mexico, she said, is the only place where she will sit, for hours at a time, and simply listen to the world.
- The changes to Galisteo are less apparent to the untrained eye. With a population of roughly 250 people and no stores, schools or post office, the village still presents as a sleepy town that time forgot. The tectonic shifts just below the surface, however, are painfully obvious to residents like Lucy Lippard, 87. The art writer, activist and sometime curator first saw Galisteo in the middle of the night in 1985 when she climbed the volcanic hogback north of town to stargaze. The artists moved in, then the money followed. In 2001, the fashion designer Tom Ford tapped the architect Tadao Ando to build a futuristic glass and concrete ranch with a reflecting pool (what Lippard calls a “moat”), which Ford sold a few years ago to the Silicon Valley billionaires Jen Rubio and Stewart Butterfield. Jeffrey Epstein’s former ranch, just south of Galisteo, was listed for $27.5 million in 2021. “My friends can’t afford to be here anymore unless they already live here,” said Lippard. “It’s all completely out of reach for writers and artists who haven’t gotten rich.”
For those of you who haven’t made the trek to our Rising Circle Ranch in the midst of the massive Galisteo Basin, we welcome you as it’s a place where awe is your best friend.
-Chip