James Magee, an enigmatic and idiosyncratic artist and poet who spent four decades building a starkly beautiful monument of stone and steel in the West Texas desert that may be the most significant artwork most people have never heard of, died on Sept. 14 at his home in Fremont, Mich. He was 79.
The cause was complications of colon and prostate cancer, said Judith Gaskin, a friend.
In 1981, Mr. Magee, who lived in Texas but grew up in Michigan, began working on a quartet of imposing native stone buildings that he called the Hill, though they are neither on a hill nor near one. They look like rectangular bunkers, or ancient temples, or the sacred site of some intergalactic species that sprung up centuries ago — or perhaps a vision of a postapocalyptic future. They recall, sort of, the minimalist artist Donald Judd’s concrete cubes in Marfa, Texas, or the land-art pioneer Michael Heizer’s inscrutable “City” in Nevada.
But the Hill isn’t a paean to minimalism or a work of land art, exactly. Mr. Magee described it as his own private existential exploration and meditation, and as a container for his deeply personal work: massive steel pieces, some of which resemble religious diptychs and reliquaries, which hold bits of metal, crushed glass, wire, canvas and other industrial detritus, along with more delicate materials, like dried hibiscus, cinnamon and paprika. They are abstract assemblages that nonetheless hint at narratives, often Christian ones.
For most of his life, Mr. Magee worked outside the contemporary art world, not being temperamentally suited to what he called its “showbiz” ways. But a few of its denizens, notably the art historian and professor Richard Brettell, who died in 2020, made multiple pilgrimages to the Hill, awe-struck by what Mr. Magee was undertaking. Mr. Brettell, who in 2010 published a book with Jed Morse, chief curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, about Mr. Magee’s work, wrote of being completely unhinged when he first saw the Hill.
“Anyone who has visited the Hill,” he wrote, “divides his or her life into two new parts, Before and After the Hill.”
Indeed, Mr. Magee, who had a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and studied sculpture in Paris, had many lives and adventures before the Hill.
He worked as a Pinkerton guard in Boston, a cabdriver in New York, a welder in upstate New York, a lawyer for the New York City Planning Commission and an aide at a home for the mentally disabled. He helped the Quaker United Nations Office write policy papers on the rights of conscientious objectors, designed and built sets for experimental operas, and worked as a roughneck on oil rigs in Odessa, Texas.
For a few years, he split his time between Ithaca, N.Y., where he lived alone in a former lingerie factory and made art — enormous metal pieces that evoked sadomasochistic rituals and terrible agonies — and Manhattan, where he prowled the waterfront piers for sex and frequented the leather bars nearby. On the piers, he also performed, Beat-style, the free-verse poetry he had begun to write. (He first declaimed his poems into old empty dairy tanks he found in a junkyard, loving the echo the words made.)
Inspired by Bolton Landing, the former fox farm in the Adirondack Mountains where the sculptor David Smith made and arrayed his work, Mr. Magee began looking for land where he could do the same with his large metal pieces. He found El Paso by accident, and he ended up staying.
On a trip to Mexico City, the train he was riding derailed near there, and he spent a few weeks in a Y.M.C.A. falling in love with the place. He found its cultural diversity invigorating. He loved the harsh desert light and its lunar terrain. He was inspired by the pageantry in the drag bars over the border in Juárez. He began to buy property, and he started an iron works business making decorative accessories for the home, which he sold to luxury retailers throughout the country.
He also began painting as an alter ego: an elderly librarian from the Midwest named Annabel Livermore, who came into him, he said, “fully formed” in the 1970s. She painted abstract, incandescent scenes of nature and light, which were set in ornate gold frames made by her “friend,” James Magee.
He made a studio for her, and he showed her work to Adair Margo, who at the time was a gallerist in El Paso. “He told me, ‘Annabel lives in the boiler room and collects shovels,’” Ms. Margo said by phone, recalling their first meeting. “He always spoke of her in the third person. The work was naïf and delightful and I told him, ‘I could sell this.’”
Annabel’s first show, at Ms. Margo’s gallery in 1987, nearly sold out. Since then, her paintings have been shown around the country, including at Yale University, and in 2007 the El Paso Art Museum held a major exhibition of her work. Annabel has attracted serious collectors, as well as Laura Bush, the former first lady. At first, dealers might arrive at Annabel’s studio only to be told by her assistant — that would be Mr. Magee — that she’d been called away on a family emergency. As Annabel’s reputation grew, Mr. Magee dropped the ruse, though he never stopped referring to her in the third person.
Annabel was also a philanthropist. In 1990, she established a flower fund in her name to put bouquets in patients’ rooms in the local hospital; she also designed a chapel there filled with her artwork. And she has her own museum, the Museo Livermore, set in a house Mr. Magee bought and renovated. He called himself the museum’s curator and janitor.
Over the decades, while Annabel was enjoying her success and churning out paintings, Mr. Magee was buying up land in the desert a few hours away and building the structures that would become the Hill.
At first, only close friends were allowed to visit. Mr. Magee showed each building according to a prescribed choreography, which began with his opening the vast steel doors to light the work inside (there is no electricity). Each building holds one or two of his monumental pieces — “these sort of industrial reliquaries,” Mr. Morse, the curator, said. “At a certain point, after you’ve looked for a while, Jim will stand behind you and ask if you’d like to hear the works’ ‘titles,’ and then he would begin to recite.”
The titles are evocative prose poems that weave memory and fantasy — stories of being a boy in Michigan, for example, and of ecstatic experiences both religious and sexual, or of the wind in the desert. Mr. Magee called them “sideline glances at the work itself.”
Horace Mayfield, who made quasi-religious, homoerotic art, was another Magee persona, though less well known than Annabel. He, too, had his own studio, in a little adobe house Mr. Magee bought. Mr. Magee had been smart with real estate in El Paso, which funded his art making.
“The landscape of his thoughts is enormous,” Mr. Brettell told Texas Monthly in 2020. “How do you put him in one place? Is he a writer, is he an artist, is he a man, is he a woman, a painter, a sculptor? He defies efforts to catalog.”
He added: “He is among the greatest artists of my generation. He’ll be incredibly famous after he dies.”
He was, Ms. Margo said, “intense and seemed conflicted.” She continued: “Over time, I came to see his work as profoundly Christian, telling him once that he was literally laying his sins on the cross in those altarpieces. He’d been through black darkness — and he became, most definitely, a person of light.”
Mr. Magee was a double amputee who had lived for decades with H.I.V. (when he was diagnosed in the early 1990s, he was told he would die within three years). A youthful football injury gone awry led to a rare and progressive bone disease as he aged; to remain mobile and keep working, he elected at age 50 to have his legs removed below the knees and replaced with titanium prosthetics. In recent years, Ms. Margo called him Lazarus.
James Robert Magee was born on June 3, 1945, in Fremont, the only son of Mary (Branstrom) and Robert Magee. His father owned a car dealership.
Jim couldn’t read until the fifth grade; he was, in his words, “really, really dyslexic.” But he was popular in high school, a class cutup who played football and ran track — not well, but with enthusiasm. He graduated in 1964.
His art education, such as it was, began when his grandfather bought him a copy of “Janson’s History of Art,” which moved him so much that he memorized it. He also took drawing lessons from a local artist. He studied history and French at Alma College, a small liberal arts school in Alma, Mich., and, after graduating in 1968, went backpacking through Africa. He returned to the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a law degree in 1971; he then headed to France for a year, to study with an American sculptor in Paris and spend time in a Trappist monastery in Normandy.
He is survived by his sisters, Susan Wente and Barbara Kemble, and his partner, Camilla Carr, a screenwriter and playwright.
The Hill is now run by the Cornudas Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit with a stewardship board that works in collaboration with the El Paso Community Foundation to find ways to fund and present Mr. Magee’s work.
“I would hope that some of this effort would be meaningful for someone, not any throng of people necessarily,” Mr. Magee said in 2016 in an oral history interview for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. “That’s all I really hope for, that maybe somebody might come by, and whose sensibilities are similar to mine. And he or she would say, ‘Oh, yeah. This Magee was here, and he kind of saw some things that I saw or felt.’”
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