JAMES MAGEE, born on this date (d: 09/14/2024) was an American artist from Fremont, Michigan. Prior to his death, he was based in El Paso, Texas, where he developed most of his artistic career. His main artistic focus was The Hill of James Magee, an art installation located in the Chihuahuan Desert, one hour and twenty minutes outside of El Paso.
Born in Fremont, Michigan, Magee attended Alma College in Alma, Michigan, where he majored in history and minored in French and graduated in 1968. In 1971, he obtained a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Mr. Magee spent the immediate two years of his post-college life living in Paris as an assistant to the American sculptor Caroline Lee and her partner, the Serbian sculptor Radivoje Knežević. He then lived in New York for ten years, where he worked diverse jobs such as cab driver, union welder and assistant to Tommy Koh, the Singapore Ambassador to the United Nations. This last job allowed him to travel to Geneva, where he wrote structural analysis for the UN Law of the Sea Conference.
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.
During this time in New York, Mr. Magee began performing his poetry in the piers at the end of Christopher Street. This particular experience in the city, and the overall gay scene in the 1970’s, were one of the inspirations for The Hill and the pieces contained therein, as well as their poetic titles.
He moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1981, and in 1982, he began acquiring 2000 acres of land in the desert outside of the city, where he began construction of a complex of buildings referred to later as The Hill.
The Hill of James Magee is an art installation located in the Chihuahuan Desert, one hour and twenty minutes outside of El Paso, Texas. According to the philosopher Rudolph Weingartner, the complex “sits in a gently rolling landscape with mesmerizing views of snow-capped mountains and limitless West Texas skies, on a rising above the rocky landscape of the desert.”
To get to The Hill, one must drive through the desert, “harsh, gently hilly, unremitting bright in the day, black at night, silent but for the wind and the occasional car or truck or perhaps the shriek of a mouse caught by a hawk”, as Richard Bretell has written. It is almost impossible to find the site unless guided by Mr. Magee.
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 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.
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.
Magee died from colon and prostate cancer in Fremont, on September 14, 2024, at the age of 79.