T’s Art issue looks at the iconoclastic artists who have found power in saying no.
BELEN, N.M., IS a sun-bleached stucco town set in a vast expanse of desert. From here to the horizon, there’s almost nothing taller than a telephone pole. Highway signs offer ominous haikus (“Notice / Do not pickup hitchhikers / Prison facilities”) and inadvertent riddles (“Dust storms may exist”). Although it’s only 35 miles south of Albuquerque, Belen feels utterly removed from the rhythms of urban life.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d end up living here,” said the artist Judy Chicago, as she considered the place she’s called home for about thirty years. Belen does seem like an odd choice for a feminist icon whose recent honors include retrospectives at LUMA Arles, an arts center in southern France, and the Serpentine Galleries in London. It’s a world away from Los Angeles, where Chicago came up in the 1960s, and New York, where her masterpiece “The Dinner Party” (1974-79) is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum. But 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.
Contrary to their reputations, big cities can be stifling places for artists. The same density of creative souls that fosters community also breeds competition. In New York, where there are hundreds of commercial galleries, it can be difficult to escape the noise of a rival’s latest triumph or show up to a party where everyone’s read your bad reviews. The ability to experiment un-self-consciously fades as careers calcify around successful formulas or fatal missteps. “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,” said Chicago. “I never fit in.”
Chicago belongs to a larger group of artists who made for the mountains and deserts of New Mexico decades before the current exodus of artists from urban centers was underway. Back then, to disappear physically was to risk being forgotten. “I felt like I was stepping out of the cosmos completely,” said the sculptor Larry Bell, 84, who left Los Angeles for Taos in 1973. Moving, he said, was “the best choice and the worst choice at the same time.” There was a robust regional art market and an appreciation for modern painters like Georgia O’Keeffe, but no context for Bell’s conceptual work, luminous glass environments that create subtle optical effects. To get back on collectors’ radars, Bell reestablished a studio in Los Angeles in 2002 and commuted from there to Taos, a 14-hour drive, every few weeks, for the next 18 years.
These artists are in their 80s now, and the isolation they found in New Mexico is rapidly vanishing. Being truly away — undisturbed by headlines and hoopla — has become nearly impossible in the digital age. Droves of artists have deserted art world capitals in recent years, chased away by rising rents and rampant gentrification, but their departures don’t represent dramatic breaks from the scenes they left behind and can still participate in from afar. And New Mexico itself has changed. The lonely, undiscovered quality that once attracted artists (and writers from Cormac McCarthy to George R.R. Martin) has faded, in part because tax incentives for film and television production have made the state the setting for, and a prominent character in, shows like “Breaking Bad.” If New Mexico once felt like a secret among the artists who moved there, it’s become well-marked territory on the pop culture map.
Chicago began to spend significant time here in 1982 after decades of struggling to survive in an art world hostile to women — especially those who openly addressed sexism and physical experiences rarely discussed in mainstream culture, such as menstruation and childbirth. When she did manage to show her work, critics jeered. Robert Hughes, writing in Time magazine, attacked “The Dinner Party,” a monumental installation honoring 1,038 women who shaped Western civilization, for being “simple, didactic, portentous, gaudily evangelical and wholly free of wit or irony.”
Holed up at a house owned by a friend in Santa Fe, Chicago finally found the solitude she needed to focus on a project she’d begun imagining in California and during a trip through Italy. She envisioned a series of male nudes through which she could investigate the construct of masculinity, a retort to the countless paintings in which women have served as metaphors for virtues and vices. “I was thinking about what the male body could be used for,” she said. There was little precedent for training a female gaze on men, and Chicago found it “very psychologically challenging to deal with.” New Mexico gave her the space to go for it. “Screw it,” she remembers thinking (using a more forceful, less printable turn of phrase). “If Picasso can do it, I can do it.”
These works became “PowerPlay” (1982-87), a series of incandescent acrylic paintings, drawings, weavings, cast paper pieces and bronzes addressing toxic masculinity before the term existed. After two years of working in relative isolation, Chicago began venturing out in Santa Fe. She met the photographer Donald Woodman, who’d been working as an assistant to the painter Agnes Martin, at a rodeo in the village of Galisteo. Their marriage, in 1985 after a tumultuous courtship, settled the question of whether Chicago would return to the West Coast — “Donald has an anxiety attack if he can’t drive 90 miles an hour on the freeway, so that was the end of any possibility of moving back to L.A.,” she said — but staying in Santa Fe soon proved equally impossible.
The city had changed drastically in the brief time they’d been together. An influx of wealthy, mostly white outsiders during the 1980s drove up real estate prices in neighborhoods that were historically Hispano (to use the preferred term among locals of Spanish descent). Their landlord friend wanted to cash out, and the couple, $50,000 in debt after their first artistic collaboration, began looking for a place they could afford. They bought a derelict brick hotel in Belen, a relic of the town’s former life as a bustling hub for passenger trains, for $20,000 in 1993.
Chicago, Woodman and I met in the sunroom of that onetime hotel on a clear day in April, when the wild spring winds blow trampolines out of backyards and send tumbleweeds somersaulting across roads. With her turquoise glasses, iridescent manicure, pink sweatshirt and trademark purple lipstick, Chicago was a shock of color against the dusty shades of beige outside. What it is about New Mexico that’s made her stay? There are other places, after all, where one can find seclusion and lax speed limits. Why not … Arizona?
“I don’t like Arizona at all,” Chicago said.
Utah?
“A Mormon state?” she said, even more incredulous.
Many of the artists I spoke to struggled to distill the singular appeal of New Mexico. (“It’s just one of these places where you wave at your neighbors,” said Bell with a shrug.) Woodman, 79, who has been here since 1972, hazarded a guess. New Mexico, he said, is better suited to rebels and renegades. “It’s where all the outlaws end up.”
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.
After World War I, many modern artists disillusioned with cities, machines and industrial notions of progress were drawn to rural places they perceived as more primitive, spiritual and authentic than their own. Americans were consciously shaking off the influence of Europe, which no longer seemed like an enviable model of civilization. “The war has accomplished this for the painter, it has demanded originality of him,” wrote the artist Marsden Hartley, who visited Taos in 1918. “It has sent him back to his own soil to ponder and readjust himself to a conviction of his own and an esthetics of his own.” Determined to invent a new American art, painters went searching for its soul in New Mexico.
Hartley, however, was overwhelmed by the landscapes he tried to contain on canvas. “It is very handsome country, yet it is taking me a time to get into my system certain particularities,” he told the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was also his New York art dealer. “The spaces are so huge here and so simple and details are so clear that nothing seems far off and distance is like a fiction for the eye.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, who’d grown up near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, wasn’t intimidated by the vast expanses of New Mexico. She fell in love with the sere, indifferent beauty of its deserts, cliffs and badlands. Here O’Keeffe discovered the autonomy and solitude she lacked on the East Coast, where she was not only an art star but wife and muse to Stieglitz. Her life there was dominated by his circle, whose theorizing she found tiresome. “The meaning of a word — to me — is not as exact as the meaning of a color,” she later wrote. O’Keeffe didn’t intellectualize the places that moved her. She painted them.
Five years after visiting Taos in 1929, when she was 41, O’Keeffe began spending summers at Ghost Ranch, a remote dude ranch near the village of Abiquiu. There she was free to pursue, on her own terms, a relationship with the land. “I would rather come here than any other place I know,” she told Stieglitz in 1940. “It is a way for me to live very comfortably at the tail end of the earth so far away that hardly anyone will ever come to see me and I like it.” She learned to drive and converted a Ford Model A into a mobile studio, unbolting the driver’s seat so it could swivel around to face a canvas, and followed unpaved roads to camp in remote locales. The bones she found filled her paintings. A photograph by Ansel Adams from 1937 shows O’Keeffe in a broad-brimmed felt hat, denim shirt and dungarees. Smiling proudly, she holds the spine and ribs of a cow in one hand and its head, still covered in flesh and fur, in the other.
O’Keeffe sometimes took her pioneer identity to arrogant extremes. She was possessive, for instance, of Cerro Pedernal, the mesa where her ashes were scattered in 1986. “It’s my private mountain,” she told a reporter near the end of her life, offering a sentiment that might have surprised locals whose ancestors had been there for centuries. “It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” Still, she was a hero to feminists like Chicago, and helped crystallize an enduring notion of New Mexico as a haven for independent women.
Agnes Martin, a celebrated painter of serene grids and subtle bands of color, landed in New Mexico after an abrupt departure from New York, where she’d suffered a series of psychotic breaks. When the younger artist Harmony Hammond met her a decade later, in 1978, Martin was living in Galisteo, a small, drought-stricken village south of Santa Fe. Her home was a trailer she’d had Woodman camouflage by covering its exterior with adobe mud.
“I was amazed that this woman who has ‘made it’ as an artist, who has the money and freedom to spend all her time on her work, has such a small studio and chooses to live in this funky little place,” Hammond wrote in her journal that night. “It was a sparse, clean feeling. Coming from New York, I was impressed with the simplicity of her life and found myself fantasizing something similar.”
Those dreams lingered with Hammond, who settled in Galisteo in 1989, when a defunct wool barn came up for sale. Now it’s a handsome loft with sunlight streaming through the skylights and leather furniture around the fireplace. Back then it was a ruin. “This was really rough and raw,” she said when I visited in April, waving toward the living room. “I called it ‘the pit.’” The unheated stone building was full of debris. Snakes and rodents came and went through gaps in the floorboards. For a decade, her kitchen consisted of a hot plate. Hammond didn’t care. Just outside her door, miles of blond grass and sage-green saltbush spread out beneath the infinite blue above. Hers was the kind of view Willa Cather had in mind when she observed in “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” her 1927 novel set in New Mexico, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”
Moving to New Mexico (first to Santa Fe in 1984) was supposed to be a one-year reprieve from her frenetic life in New York, where she had helped found A.I.R. Gallery (the first all-female collective gallery) and the journal Heresies. She was also a single mother and a lesbian juggling part-time jobs and a studio practice in an overwhelmingly straight, male industry. 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.”
New Mexico shifted the materials in Hammond’s work. Long drives through the desert to a teaching gig in Tucson, Ariz., took her past abandoned farms, places steeped in the unknowable stories of vanished inhabitants, where she would recover scraps of linoleum, burned lumber and battered sheets of tin. In subsequent works on canvas, grommeted straps of material salvaged from aikido mats (Hammond practiced the martial art for decades) become bandages binding abstract bodies. These paintings, steeped in metaphor, caught the eye of the New York dealer Alexander Gray, who began representing her in 2013. Hammond, 80, now lives mostly off sales of her art.
The severity of the landscape is not for everyone. “Until I came to New Mexico,” goes an old quip most often attributed to Mark Twain, “I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.” But for artists like Hammond, who infuse their work with a layered sense of history, New Mexico makes sense. Every day there confronts you with the sheer immensity of time. In the ribbons of color in the cliffs, the stratigraphic bands of ocher, ash and rust, “you literally see eons,” said 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.
I HAD BEEN in Santa Fe for approximately 30 minutes, just long enough to rent a car and find a CVS, when an older man in line at the pharmacy began lamenting the ways the city has changed. Locals are getting priced out by wealthy newcomers, lately from Texas and California, and Santa Fe is becoming increasingly segregated along distinct ethnic and socioeconomic lines. Building codes designed to preserve a nostalgic, tourist-friendly version of the city’s aesthetic have turned the town into an adobe Disneyland. On Canyon Road, a picturesque drag of adobe homes where Chicago and Woodman once paid $200 a month in rent, shops now sell linen caftans (“desert tunic dresses”) for nearly twice as much. In Taos, it’s easier to find turquoise jewelry than a grocery store.
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 with Chicago and Woodman. After frequent visits with Hammond, Lippard left her loft in New York for a plot of land on the creek in 1992. She built what she could afford: a home measuring 16 by 24 feet. (Locals called it the “Smurf house.”) Although she’s added rooms over the years whenever she’s had the money, Lippard still clambers up a ladder in the lemon yellow living room to sleep in a loft. “People,” she said, referring to her family, “are very annoyed by that.
Lippard powers her home with solar panels, which is easy to do without a washing machine, dryer, microwave, TV or dishwasher. She lives an old-school, off-grid life in a village that is becoming increasingly stylish in the way that SoHo, her old neighborhood in Manhattan, did: 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.”
Lippard has grappled with her own role in the steady transformation of Galisteo, in part by writing several books on the region’s Indigenous history, the stories of the Hispano families who have lived in the village for centuries and the ecological threats posed by military and mining concerns. She is, in her words, doing her “damnedest to keep the old history going, so people know where they are, at least.”
The sense of place outsiders must work to cultivate comes naturally to the artist Rose B. Simpson. Born and raised in Santa Clara Pueblo (Kha’P’o Owingeh in Tewa), a Pueblo reservation north of Santa Fe, Simpson grew up in an adobe house her mother built by hand. When she finished her M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, most of her peers moved to New York to vie for gallery representation. Simpson wished them luck and drove back west.
Since then, the artist, 40, whose work includes ceramic and metal sculptures, performances and custom cars, has achieved a rare level of art world success. A site-specific installation currently at the Cleveland Museum of Art and another opening next year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco are the latest in a string of exhibitions and commissions across the country. Collector demand for her work is fierce. Simpson could theoretically live anywhere, but she chooses to work on the land her family owns in Española, a city bordering the reservation.
Española is far from the spa hotels and succulent gardens some tourists pine for when they picture New Mexico. It recently served as the location of “The Curse,” a cringe comedy series starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder as a pair of tone-deaf real estate developers colonizing the town with precious coffee shops and shiny new “passive homes.” Some locals have said the show perpetuates the kind of exploitation it aims to satirize, or that it misrepresents the nature of displacement occurring there, which is the result of priced-out former Santa Feans moving in, rather than rich yuppies.
“Española’s the lowrider capital of the world, also was the heroin capital of the world and now it’s just a mess,” she said as we walked from the shaded patio where she and her mother keep their kilns, past a garden, toward the metal shop where she builds her cars. She has, on occasion, experienced theft. She doesn’t take it personally. “The people who are having issues in the town are all dealing with postcolonial stress disorder,” she said. And for Simpson, this is the only place that makes sense.
“One of the reasons I came home is that I grew up participating in the ceremony,” she said, referring to the collective rituals in Pueblo culture. “I’m very dedicated to that spiritual path, and for Pueblo people, we need each other to do that. You can’t go to a powwow [anywhere] because it’s place-based. We’re praying on specific places. It has to be here.” The mountains and mesas surrounding the Pueblo are sacred and indivisible from the people themselves, who do not draw distinctions between animate and inanimate, human and not.
Simpson worries that younger generations raised online are losing the essence of old beliefs. “You can learn the language, you can learn how to dance, you can participate,” she said. “But if you don’t know why, and you don’t have a connection to it that’s real, you’re just kind of performing something.” It’s easy, she said, to “put a feather on it,” without remembering what that means.
We climbed into Simpson’s colossal red pickup truck, hit the Sonic drive-through and cruised up into the cliffs to look at the mountains in her prayers. On the way, we drove through the plaza, the main ceremonial space of the Pueblo, past the mission church (“We burned it down several times, we’re very proud of that”) and then into Los Alamos, where chemistry labs with names like “Kiva 1,” blithely sourced from tribal culture, once loomed above the valley.
We parked and Simpson’s barefoot 7-year-old daughter, Cedar, scampered out ahead of us onto an overlook above the Rio Grande, some 700 feet below. Simpson held her tattooed hands, calloused and scarred from a life spent working with metal, wood, mud and clay, to her lips and called to a passing raven with a raspy, croaking caw. The light began to fade, burnishing the ground tawny gold. Driving there, I’d asked Simpson how she feels about the many Anglo artists who’ve been drawn to her ancestral land. Below us, indigo shadows were drifting over the sloping hills, trailing behind clouds bound for the mountains, white with snow, beyond. She’d sighed. “I mean, I get it.”
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