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.
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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.
ImageMr. Magee described the Hill as his own private existential exploration and meditation, and as a container for his deeply personal work.ImageThe Hill sits in the middle of a vast desert, surrounded by pillars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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