The Big Bend remembers creator of enigmatic Hudspeth County masterwork
FAR WEST TEXAS — Memorials to James Magee — sculptor, painter, poet, welder, lawyer, roughneck, hitchhiker, visionary and friend to many — have rippled across the art world since September 14, when he passed away at the age of 79 in his hometown of Fremont, Michigan.
He is survived by his sisters, Susan Wente and Barbara Kemble, and his partner, Camilla Carr.
Among his many achievements, Magee is perhaps best known for the Hill, an indescribable work of sculpture and space he spent more than half of his life creating on an anonymous mesa in Hudspeth County.
Magee loved Marfa and Marfa loved Magee. “He always wanted to come here more than he was able to get here,” said Carolyn Pfeiffer, one of many Big Bend locals who were personally touched by his work and indefatigable spirit. “He had this extraordinarily positive personality,” she remembered. “When you came into contact with it, you were infected.”
Writer Sterry Butcher wrote a piece on Magee for Texas Monthly in 2020, and they kept in sporadic touch after that. Magee was unlike any artist she’d ever known. She compared him to the pronghorn — a misnamed West Texas creature more closely related to the giraffe than any kind of antelope. “He was way off on his own evolutionary branch,” she said.
“A merry-go-round of too much”
Though he made his home and studio in El Paso, Magee belonged to the borderlands writ large, to the Juárez queer scene, to the vast nothing of central New Mexico, to green chile cheeseburgers at May’s Café in Cornudas, Texas.
He came to Far West Texas by accident — literally, after a train derailment in Sinaloa left him stranded after a visit to Mexico City. He decided to try to get to El Paso and from there to his then-home in New York. He took the train through Chihuahua — through the Copper Canyon country and the capital city, which charmed him — and ended up in the conjoined border cities that would later become the center of his universe.
Magee’s early biography is a runaway train of its own, and trying to describe his life in a straightforward timeline is a fool’s errand.
An attempt, culled from an oral history conducted by the Smithsonian: he was born on June 3, 1945, in Fremont, Michigan, whose only claim to fame is the Gerber baby food factory. He picked up drawing very young, but he had difficulty reading and was self-described “really really really dyslexic.”
Despite that, he had a fondness for words. He had wildly diverse interests and had trouble between pursuing a five-year Ph.D. in African art and attending law school. He eventually picked law school, and later worked for the United Nations on projects like protections for conscientious objectors in the Vietnam War.
He was very well traveled, inspired by French monks and Irish revolutionaries and boatmen from Mali. After law school, he settled down in a junkyard on Staten Island in a warehouse-turned-studio. He started writing poetry and making sculpture.
Eventually he turned his sights upstate and purchased an underwear factory-turned-chicken coop to begin producing work on a bigger scale. He worked part time at a home for adults with developmental disabilities and caring for an elderly man in the city. He ate a lot of pancakes and crafted a sculpture called The Rapture, made from hundreds of Mrs. Butterworth bottles.
During the oil boom of 1979, Magee came to Texas seeking work on rigs outside of Odessa, temporarily abandoning his search back in New York for an isolated place to start acquiring land for a large-scale project. His time in the oilfields started getting his West Texas gears turning.
When he returned home and found that his rented cabin had been struck by lightning, he took it as a sign to permanently relocate. His other life in the city had been wearing him thin. “That was my cycle, which was absolutely insane,” he remembered. “You know, U.N., home for the dying, gay bar, sex club, gay bar … then by one or two in the morning St. Mark’s Baths and then home to bed … then wake up with six hours of sleep and go to the U.N.”
The following year, he settled down for good in El Paso. “I could not keep this up,” he said. “Texas was there, and I knew it might be able to save me from a merry-go-round of too much.”
Journey of death as seen through the eyes of the rancher’s wife
Magee did not go to El Paso alone. Annabel Livermore — a retired librarian from the Upper Midwest — came too, setting up a studio near his home and settling into the local art scene.
By some metrics, Livermore was more successful than Magee. For one, she has her own museum, championed by dealer and gallerist Adair Margo. She put up major shows at Yale and the San Diego Museum of Art and was invited to paint a hospital chapel. First Lady Laura Bush was a fan and collector.
But unlike Magee, with his intricate network of friends from around the world, Livermore was content to live her life privately. “Very few people claim to have met Miss Livermore,” wrote Edward Lucie-Smith. “She never attends her own exhibition openings but sometimes sends tape-recorded good wishes, uttered in a quavering voice.”
It did not take long for the art world to discover that Magee and Livermore were the same person. It was immediately clear to his close friends that Livermore was not a delusion, nor a sign that Magee wanted to swap his identity for a female one.
Magee himself was adamant that she was something more than a name. As a man in his 20s, Magee occasionally released work under the name J.R. McCoy, hoping to avoid attention. “[It was] I think out of some kind of embarrassment as to who I was and what I was. And my family was just heartbroken, except for my younger sister, of my having done this life that I had chosen … both the gay thing and the art thing,” he remembered in the same oral history tape for the Smithsonian.
Annabel Livermore was different. Some would use terms like “alter ego” or “persona” — but perhaps she was a portal, a way to access another part of his creativity and by extension, himself. “It’s not a pseudonym,” he insisted. “This is a friend of mine who’s had [decades] of my life. And we’re trying to do the best that we can.”
Much of Magee’s sculpture work is industrial, drawing on his time in the trades, on his skills as a welder and a builder. Among his earliest pieces were disturbingly contorted crosses and semi-humans with animal teeth smashed into the ground.
Befitting a demure Midwestern librarian, Livermore’s work could be described as softer, depicting animals and trees and tranquil bodies of water. She was deeply inspired by the Big Bend, creating a series of paintings interpreting scenes along the famous River Road.
Attorney Liz Rogers of Alpine owns a Livermore — a Juárez scene — which she hung in her kitchen. She got to know Magee and his then-partner Rod McCall in the early 1980s, when she began practicing law in El Paso. She saw the painting and had to have it, though it was wildly out of budget. “I had to reach deep, deep in my pockets,” she said. “But I’ve loved it ever since.”
Rogers was drawn to Livermore’s work for the same reason many other borderlanders do — it’s playful, but it feels honest. “She has really touched people’s heartstrings here,” Margo wrote. “She has processed the border region in a very unselfconscious way. People look at it and say, ‘This is who we are, we love this work.’”
In the spring of 2001, Magee took Livermore to a ranch in New Mexico where she could paint uninterrupted for four and a half weeks. The closest town was Truth or Consequences, 40 miles away.
The ranch was smack dab in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto — the Journey of Death — a waterless 90-mile route from Socorro to Las Cruces that early settlers would often cross in the middle of the night to avoid the heat. Hundreds of years later, the Americans considered it just as unfit for human habitation as the Spanish and used it to test nuclear bombs.
Livermore was taken by LaVerne Walker, whose husband owned the property. She was fascinated by how Walker had made a life in such a remote and inhospitable place and named the series of New Mexico paintings Journey of Death as Seen Through the Eyes of the Rancher’s Wife.
Like much of Livermore’s work, the paintings are not straightforward landscapes. They’re not photorealistic; all of the Rancher’s Wife paintings have a warm, fiery palette of reds and oranges and yellows. Some of them are anchored to the canvas by a tiny ridge of mountains at the bottom. The rest of the massive 6-foot frame is presumably sky, busy with brush strokes that evoke clouds, storms, wind and mysterious forms.
The name of the series was just as much a part of the work as the paint itself. “If a woman regularly drives 40 miles to get a loaf of bread, she’ll think a lot about death,” Livermore wrote.
Before and after the Hill
A hundred-odd miles away from the ranch, another important work was rooting itself in the land, this time outside of Cornudas, Texas. Located between El Paso and Dell City, Cornudas is more of a collection of buildings than a town — the 2000 Census estimated a population of 19 people.
The only business is the Cornudas Café, formerly known as May’s, after outspoken former proprietor May Carson. Carson passed away in 2018, but the café still receives a few visitors each year looking for the Hill.
She would later tell an interviewer that some folks in the area suspected Magee was a “devil worshiper,” but by most accounts they had a warm relationship. “If you can live in Cornudas, you are something,” said Magee’s friend Judith Gaskin. “Maybe people there thought he was weird, but they respected him.”
In 1981, Magee started buying up land in Cornudas for a project he’d been envisioning, in one shape or another, his entire adult life. He started with 100 acres and gradually worked his way up to 2,000 to begin a work he called “the Hill,” made up of four structures that are 40 feet long, 20 feet wide and 17 feet high.
Magee surveyed the place by hand, setting out with a string and compass to mark where the structures would one day be built. There were never any blueprints, no architect. The rock work was done by hand. Massive sculpted panels and intricate floor pieces were assembled and welded by Magee himself.
Over the past four decades, the Hill has formed a sort of cult following — unknown to most, but feverishly evangelized by the few who know it. “The Hill was not originally conceived as a ‘work of art’ nor should it be thought of as merely a configuration of four buildings holding artwork within,” Magee wrote. “Instead the Hill in its entirety, as I believe it to be, is one single sculpture or spiritual ornament laid out in the form of a cross and configured with doors opening up into doors opening up into doors opening up into doors.”
Very few people have ever seen the Hill, which has traditionally cost a few hundred dollars, payable to the Cornudas Mountain Foundation, to visit. This was not an act of exclusionary art world cool kid snobbery — it costs the foundation around $2,000 per viewing to operate the Hill.
First, there’s the long drive from El Paso and the renting of a four-wheel drive vehicle. Then the Hill has a lot of heavy, moving parts that need to be operated by a team of workers — the third building typically requires four people to open it.
A key facet of the experience itself is Magee, who wrote long titles for each work — works in their own right that others might describe as poems. He would accompany each small group and read the titles as they processed the immensity of the work.
The total effect is impossible for the few who have seen it to describe. It has been called “startling” and “sacred.” A common response to the work is for viewers to burst into tears.
“The art defies description,” wrote Bob Ostertag. “Giant works of many tons each. Steel and iron triptychs on huge ball bearings. Studies in rust and decay and debris. Acid and honey. Beeswax and burnt rubber. Paprika and cold-rolled steel. Barbed wire and pig bone.”
“Going to the Hill is not like going to view art,” he continued, “but going not only into the dreams and the imagination, but also the bones, blood and muscle of James Magee.”
Art historian Richard Brettell put it in simpler terms. “Anyone who has visited the Hill divides his or her life into two new parts — before and after the Hill.”
While the Hill does not involve the land in the same way that works of the Southwestern land art pantheon do, Magee was always concerned about maintaining some of that sacredness. Despite Cornudas’ isolation, he started to notice development in the background — just before his death, a pair of oil rigs popped up in the horizon. (Thankfully, they disappeared.)
He started constructing a series of columns to encircle the work, creating a sense of protection without closing it off from the outside world. “It doesn’t deny what is happening on the other side,” he said. “I think that would be kind of wrong to hide a place from what is happening on the other side.”
After the Hill
Magee understood that there would soon come a day where he could no longer oversee his masterwork. In 2022, he filled a large binder with his will and vision.
Eric Pearson, president of the El Paso Community Foundation, also serves on the Cornudas Mountain Foundation board. The two foundations joined forces to provide a blueprint for the Hill’s preservation. “Everyone agrees that the goal is to sustain the Hill into perpetuity,” Gaskin, who also serves on the board, said.
In the short term, this arrangement allows Magee’s assistant, Juan Muñoz of El Paso, to continue working. “He was always amazed by Juan,” Gaskin said.
A celebration of Magee’s life is tentatively set for the first week of May 2025 at the Hill.
While access to the Hill and the Museo Livermore might be limited until then, there are a few ways to sit with the work.
Butcher, who spent so much time trying to put his life into words, recommends visiting the meditation room at the University Medical Center of El Paso, which was designed by Annabel Livermore.
The space features a cosmic overhead painting and a series of smaller paintings on hinges, which visitors can open and leave a prayer for a loved one. “Everything you need to know about the artist is in that space, I think, and its elements echo what is at the Hill,” she said. “Wisdom, beauty, a certain whimsy, tenderness, mystery. What more could express love than to create a place of solace and communion?”
Magee was just as unable to describe the sanctity and inwardness of his work, but he did try. “Art for me is some kind of a meditation, and that is a very private act,” he said. “It has nothing to do with show biz, or anything else. That’s how I see it. It’s the taking in of beauty, you know, in all its strange configurations.”
